Posted: by The Alt Editing Staff
At one point during my conversation with Ben Sooy (vocals/guitar) and Nick Webber (guitar/vocals) of A Place for Owls, Sooy describes the band as “youth pastor core.” It’s a joke within the band, but how we dig in the earth, the band’s upcoming sophomore album, does fall in a proud sonic lineage of indie rock records that grapple with faith–think Pedro the Lion, Sinai Vessel, Manchester Orchestra, particularly as Sooy sounds at points almost exactly like the latter’s Andy Hull. The album is a massive expansion on the rain-soaked melodicism of A Place for Owls, a record that pulled liberally from Empire! Empire! and old Death Cab. “We feel like we swung for the fences,” Webber admits, and it sure sounds like it; these songs are huge, and there’s a clear confidence on display that never quite came to the fore on their 2022 debut.
It’s clear in the album’s canny single choices: “broken open seed” inverts the traditional emo song structure, gradually quieting down until it flickers out–but not before a twinkling bridge that folds lap steel into the mix; “a tattoo of a candle” features the biggest hook in the band’s entire catalog; and “what i have to say” filters ’90s emo through 2024 indie rock signifiers, sax and banjo and lap steel all melting together for the song’s cathartic outro. Other songs, like “hourglass” and the explosive closer “help me let the right ones in,” stretch Sooy’s voice almost to its breaking point; a number of how we dig in the earth‘s sparser songs find the band turning in their most beautiful work to date, the airy “huston lake” and slow-burning “haunted” in particular.
Or consider “desmond hume,” the LP’s requisite LOST reference track, which describes a heated phone call between Sooy and his stepfather over Sooy’s mother’s abandonment of her children. “My stepdad died / and I felt only relief,” he exhales towards the start of the song; an ugly but honest admission of both Sooy and his stepfather’s humanity. That, he and Webber agree, is the thrust of the record–a sense of shared humanity in the face of suffering. It’s a suffering, the record posits, that can only be overcome together, if you “find your friends and hold them close.” For forty-five minutes, in some of the best guitar music to come out in 2024, A Place for Owls make that kind of communal bloodletting sound painless.
Over the course of the hour or so that the three of us talk, we touch on that, on the experience of collaborating with some of their idols, and on the value of a drunken saxophone solo. Read the interview below.
It’s release week. How are the vibes? How are you guys feeling?
Ben Sooy: For me, a mixture of excitement and big feelings and existential terror. It’s surprising to me to feel this way. While writing these songs there were a lot of big feelings, pain and confusion, and in the studio there was another wave. These songs are intense for me to sing. After we got them on tape last August, I felt free, like I’d never have to feel that way again. Then, right this week, there’s a feeling that there’s all this heavy stuff here, and we’re playing it front to back at the release show–”desmond hume” and “hourglass” are heavy. I’ve gotten better with “hourglass,” because it ends on a hopeful note, but “desmond hume” especially we’ll never play live again. I don’t ever want to. I don’t know about Nick, but I’m excited and also feeling intense.
Nick Webber: Similarly! It’s intense, and I’m also excited. Part of it is doing it DIY feels like, “did we miss something?” We just got a notification that vinyl shipped today, and we might have it for the release show–we ordered it forever ago, stuff like that. The mystery of it, too–we don’t know if it’s gonna resonate. I have no clue. I think we made the record we were supposed to, at the end of the day. We love it.
Ben, I’m glad you mention how much heavier this album is, lyrically, than the older A Place for Owls material. What was it like to decide to go here, to put all these thoughts and feelings and pain on record?
Sooy: I write as therapy. The splits and the first album and the acoustic EP were just general depression. Something is not right, vaguely. The world is probably okay–but I still feel fucked up. That’s what I was singing about, and the main difference is that this record is more about bad things happening. It was the same process, writing to see what I’m feeling. Songs for me, they save me. I’m able to create beauty out of this ugly reality, and the band can create meaning out of it. That doesn’t make it okay, but processing it through song makes it kind of better. You’re saying it. There’s the proverb: joy shared is double joy, and sorrow shared is half sorrow. You don’t need to solve your problems, but talking it through is some sort of solution.
What was the process of writing these songs like?
Webber: Ben tends to bring the bones of most things to the band–he writes on acoustic guitar and brings us a folk song. The first voice memo we get is a folk song, but sometimes he’s got a vision for it that we follow, and sometimes it’s generative for someone else in the band. Whoever is sparked runs with it. We’ve built songs around drum parts, and Ryan’s an insane bassist, so the ideas spark organically. We tried to make “desmond hume” a full band song, but what’s on the record is a voice memo. It was the first time Ben played it straight through, and I played piano on it, and producer Dave added strings, but the basis is the voice memo. We did multiple versions of “when your eyes close,” too. There’s a slowcore version, an alt-country version, and the one on the record, which kinda sounds like The Cure. There’s a lot of wiggle room.
Sooy: After the Celebration Guns split–the song “25” was a Nick song, and there’s a version on his solo record. I helped with the second verse after he brought in the bones–I think that sparked something new with the band where we help each other with lyrics. That didn’t happen on A Place for Owls. Those lyrics were all me. Daniel and I cowrote “find your friends and hold them close,” which was about a mutual friend who kinda went off the rails and decided we were bad dudes. We hadn’t done anything really worth that sort of public condemnation. That was a shared experience that Daniel and I–because we were housemates–tried to put songwriting time on the books. It was totally cowritten front to back, the riff, the melody, the chorus. That’s new for the band. I still like writing and recording at three am, but writing together is a cool new thing.
Nick, I know you have a lyric credit on “a tattoo of a candle.” Is that the same thing?
Webber: Sometimes Ben reaches out to me if he’s stuck on a verse or something. I remember pretty much rewriting the whole first verse. He used the rest as fodder for something to resonate with him more. He’s done that several times, and it organically becomes something we all feel good about.
Sooy: When Daniel used to live at his old house, he had a shed, and we’d write in there. We’d drink a bunch and smoke cigs in there. Me, Nick, Daniel, and Ryan sometimes would hang out, and “a tattoo of a candle” was a joke chorus at first. I was just like, “I’m smoking cigarettes with Daniel / a tattoo of a candle,” because he’d just gotten a sick tattoo literally of a candle. Then I realized that was kinda profound, actually. We write joke songs a lot.
Webber: Ben and I write differently, too. I tend to be more like an essayist. I think I’ve gotten away from that, but it’s like an English class. Ben is more about how it sings, if it’s true. Sometimes we help each other that way. I can’t pick up the throughline, and I’ll do a heavyhanded pass, but Ben will run with it.
I think “find your friends and hold them close” is my favorite on here, or it’s top three at least.
Webber: I love that one.
As much as it can be bittersweet, lyrically, that song feels like it captures A Place for Owls’s ethos as a band.
Sooy: We wanted to write a couple love songs to friendship and community. Even though that one started from a place of mischaracterization, it moves into a place where you can recognize that your friends are people of peace, and you can move through your disagreements if you come to them with love. That one and “a tattoo of a candle” both felt like love songs to friendship. The main thing that stabilized me during all the shit me and my wife went through was our friendships. Daniel, in the band, has been my best for twenty years, and his wife Jennifer has been my wife’s best friend for years. To have a friendship like that, one that lasts decades–almost til death do us part–there are songs for that. We also wanted, with “find your friends and hold them close,” to write a twinkly emo song. We don’t write riffs–we start with chords–but for that one we started with riffs and then wrote chords around them.
Is Jennifer, then, the one who cowrote “haunted”?
Sooy: Yes! My wife and I were housemates with them, and Jennifer overheard me playing “haunted” on guitar, and she heard me struggling. She wrote the line, “I swear you can’t see me as I walk through the wall.” That whole verse has her fingerprints, and she’s not a songwriter. She’s just a mom, a wife, a friend–part of our purpose was to normalize amateurs doing music. The idea was you don’t have to be an expert or get paid to do it.
Webber: Good luck getting paid to do it!
Sooy: Exactly, yeah! Jennifer became a songwriter, though, doing that with me, and it was so fulfilling.
I know you’re big fans of Ben Seretan and Elliott Green, and they’re both on here. Ben Seretan’s all over the record–he’s on three songs. How did you link up with those two?
Webber: I’ve been a fan of Ben Seretan for a long time. Youth Pastoral hit me hard. I spent a summer with that and it was formative for me. He started doing ambient music–or I just discovered it–and he did it perfectly. We started chatting online, and he became a fan of the band through Twitter stuff, and we’d chat casually. We got rough mixes back, and Ben wanted to hear them. We sent the only three mixes we had at that point, and he did stuff over them. He did lap steel and synth stuff, beautiful ambient sounds. If we had more mixes he probably would’ve done more! We didn’t even ask him!
Sooy: Elliott should have blown up by now. It’s proof that music isn’t a meritocracy. She’s literally one of my favorite songwriters, and she plays guitar in an interesting and complex way. We’ve been online friends, and when we did the Celebration Guns tour we reached out to her and Byung–B.J., who also played pedal steel on “haunted”–and they both opened the Seattle show. We spend a lot of time trying to be champions for artists we love, and those are two of our favorites. Elliott wrote those harmonies–she writes in a way that no one else does, and they are beautiful, haunting. They were people we wanted to collaborate with. They’re friends, and they’re great.
Webber: B.J. volunteered himself. He’s a session musician. I think he’s on a recent Damien Jurado project.
Ben Seretan and Byung also contribute instrumentation you guys have never used before, and then “what i have to say” has a ton of layers to it–trumpet, sax, banjo. It sounds like in the cases of those two, you didn’t have a ton of say in what was added, but how did “what i have to say” come to be? Is it just that you had a lyric about a “closet saxophone” you needed an actual saxophone in there?
Webber: I don’t think it was conscious. Daniel and I had written a trumpet and sax harmony for the ending–that whole ending riff is from before I joined the band. It was a song called “Lost Weekend” that’ll probably never see the light of day. It’s from maybe 2019.
Sooy: Ever since Nick joined the band, he’s always played sax live. When we do “Dissolver” and “Do I Feel at Home Here?” he plays sax on those live. It rules. It’s all about the moxie. Sax has always felt like a part of the band, and we’ve always loved American Football and that trumpet, so we wanted to try emo with horns. At the end, every instrument we play anywhere on the record happens there. Daniel played banjo on “Smoke Monster” from A Place for Owls, which felt kinda alt-country, but “what i have to say” doesn’t. Jesse, our drummer, played that gorgeous tappy part before the second verse. Every member of the band played strings on that song. I don’t know if I want to dissect the lyrics.
Webber: You should do this one.
Sooy: Should I? So my mom has not been sane or kind toward me. She left my family in the night when I was 16. She’s diagnosed with schizophrenia, multiple personalities–she’s unwell, so I can’t hold it against her. One of the positive legacies she left me is that she’s a musician. One of my first encounters as a kid with music was her–she wrote her own music, never played covers–and I don’t think I’d be into music without seeing my mom do it. The first verse is a bit of a prayer, and the second verse is speaking to my mom and not to God. I can trace all of me back to her, and the darkness and joy I carry are inheritance from her. My mom didn’t play for other people, so that “closet saxophone” line is a memory. She’d go there to play when the world was too much. In the New Testament, there’s a line about groanings too deep for words, when you’re at the end of what you can express. That saxophone is a wordless groan, and the last line is about if we met in the Kingdom of Heaven, would we know what to say at all? Would we have words at all? Then you go into this instrumental section, this wordless groaning.
Webber: I don’t remember planning it.
Sooy: It wasn’t intentional, but it worked philosophically.
Webber: The sax solo wasn’t planned. I was asked to do it in the studio. I can hear that it was unplanned!
Sooy: We were also like six whiskies deep. It was a drunk solo.
Recurring through the album is a lot of arboreal imagery, trees and leaves and gardens. I’m curious the significance of that for you.
Sooy: The central metaphor was how it’s the same action digging into the soil whether you’re planting a seed or burying a loved one. Whether it’s death or bringing life and beauty and food, it’s all digging in the earth. There’s a parable from Jesus where he says that unless a seed dies in the earth, it won’t live again. There’s a sense that no joy can come without immense sorrow–the sorrow is the seed of the joy. In my own life, I only can appreciate what I have because of times of great sorrow. The gardening metaphor also works because you can plant seeds that don’t bear fruit. Me and Nick, we rent in Denver–it’s almost impossible to own a home–and there’s a sense that making the album felt like planting a garden in a house you rent. You don’t know if individual seeds will sprouts and you don’t know if your lease will be renewed. Gardening is an act of faith.
Webber: Yeah, it’s not guaranteed at all.
Sooy: Even if there’s flowers that grow, God knows if I’ll be here to see them. A lot of it ties to “hourglass.” My wife and I went through a miscarriage. That seed planting metaphor was about trying to have kids–ever since, we haven’t gotten pregnant again. It’s a fucking bummer. Still, though, I have to plan for tomorrow, even with this grief. I need to have a purpose. Still, though, you have to plant those seeds, or there’s no flowers and no food. That’s why I can’t be a capitalist anymore. I can’t just work for myself, just hoard wealth for myself.
Webber: The album title is a line from a song that we cut from the album.
Sooy: It’s an August and Everything After sort of thing. We’ll release the song in twenty years.
How many songs got cut from the album?
Sooy: We think about sequencing fairly early on. We were thinking about the story we’d tell even as I was working on writing. These songs are also in chronological order–the last song was the most recently written. I probably wrote thirty songs that could’ve been on the record, but a lot were either too weird or weren’t tied to the same narrative. We banked a lot of them for later. We started writing songs all in the same key.
Webber: The first four songs are all in G-sharp. Ben droptuned his guitar and was just writing like that for a lot of the initial process. We were going to do an EP of those four songs, but we sent it to a buddy who said it felt like a copout. He said the story wasn’t done there. We cut the last one, then, too. It felt too much like tying a bow on it.
Sooy: The song we cut is based off a Rumi poem, where the lion and the deer lay down together in the peaceable kingdom. There was a hard shift from the songs we had to that. It didn’t track. We also got nerdy on keys. G-sharp is the key of the grave. If you wanna make a mourning lamentation, write in G-sharp.
Webber: That wasn’t on purpose! We just looked it up later and found out.
Sooy: Most of the rest of the songs are in F. I wanted it to feel like cinema, one seamlessly into the other. The cutting process was letting editing a movie.
Webber: Towards the beginning there were more songs on the table. For a while “hourglass” wasn’t on the table. It was still pretty fresh for Ben for a while. He had to check in with his wife to see if it was okay. Once we locked in those first four songs, though, it was pretty intuitive.
That tracks, too, and the two halves of the record follow similar sonic arcs. Is there anything you feel like you learned and will take with you in the way you put how we dig in the earth together?
Sooy: We experienced a big confidence boost after A Place for Owls. We’re on record we thought only our wives would ever hear it. Now there’s more people who care about the record than we’ve ever met, so we went into this both more confident and with trepidation. We knew, one, that we could trust our instincts to make the record we wanna without overthinking–we’re also not making money. Any money we make goes into the band fund for t-shirts, vinyl, whatever.
Webber: It pays for itself. It evens out.
Sooy: That’s more than most artists get! We don’t rely on this, though, for our day jobs. There’s freedom in that. There was trepidation, though, now that people give a shit.
Webber: There’s now potential to disappoint. It’s the first time we can disappoint someone!
Sooy: If we were going to fail, we wanted to fail mightily. The last song on the record was going to be a long song. We’re naked thieves with this. The last song was our shot at making a Coldplay song or a Jimmy Eat World song. Can we rip off “23” and “Yellow” at once? There’s a lot that Ryan did on bass and our producer Dave did to make it sound like The Cure.
The song “when your eyes close,” which is one of my favorites, has that line in the bridge “say what you are,” which is of course a song from A Place for Owls. A lot of the lyrics in there, too, feel like callbacks to the very first EP, You Are Still in Every Song I Sing.
Sooy: There’s definitely intentionality to it. Not everybody knows this, but the bridge of “This Is Love” from that EP is the entire song “Deliberate Practice.” Before “Deliberate Practice” was out, we put the lyrics and the melody into “This Is Love.” Also on that bridge is snippets from a bunch of unreleased songs–some are still unreleased. Even from day one, we wanted to be self-referential, have lore, world-build.
Webber: It’s a different melody, maybe, a little, to be fair.
The chorus of “Book” is in there too.
Sooy: “Tell Me You Are” and “Say What You Are” have the same chorus melody, from the first EP and the first LP. “Tell Me You Are” we eventually rerecorded. Who cares? Even superfans aren’t doing the deep dive on that EP at this point, so we felt like we could steal from ourselves, and mewithoutYou is my favorite band. They did that all the time, stealing melodies, riffs, lyrics, and they’d build whole new songs.
Webber: A lot of the time, too, the callback feels meaningful to us personally. Even if it hasn’t been released, it’s an idea, and it’s meaningful to us. If it moves us, it’ll probably move someone else.
Sooy: We also stole guitar parts. Someone online discovered this.
Webber: The riff on “broken open seed” is in “Where Do You Want to Go?” It’s a different key.
Sooy: Daniel was just messing around and realized that guitar part worked over the new song.
What are some of your favorite moments that someone else in the band contributed?
Webber: Jesse, our drummer, on “find your friends,” does this hi-hat break. It isn’t complicated, but I get hyped every time. It’s right after the chorus. Ryan’s bassline on “when your eyes close” is so sick, so tasty. On “help me let the right ones in,” Daniel does this guitar solo that’s so rad. It’s so tasteful and beautiful–and it’s kinda badass.
Sooy: That one only works because there’s two vibe shifts. You think it’s over before the acoustic part, and then Jesse does this drum part. The rhythm changes, so me, as a rhythm guitarist, I have to play different. Then there’s another shift with Daniel’s lead part. Music writing is so insane because you’re in conversation with six, eight things, and you can hear it all. You understand all of it and just lock in. When I wrote that song, it was a folk song, like Gregory Alan Isakov.
Webber: I literally told Ben this was not an A Place for Owls song. I’ve never been more wrong.
Sooy: It was a Damien Rice song or something! The rest of the band took it into great new territory.
Webber: Ben, too, on that song, sings that yelly part at the end, and I think it was one take.
Sooy: I blew out my voice on the first take.
Webber: The first take was perfect. Our producer was using a hardware compressor live, trying to react to Ben. He was so moved, so hyped.
Sooy: I was leaning away from the mic, forward to the mic. Dave was adjusting the compressor watching me.
Webber: You were also ten times louder than anyone he’s ever recorded, probably. Ben was freed up to sing beautifully on this record.
Sooy: On the first record I was only singing full voice as loud as possible. Dave actually pushed me to sing as quiet as I could on a few songs. He said “huston lake” was too gentle that it would be incongruous if I sang loud. He wanted me to be as quiet as possible. That bled into “broken open seed,” too. I sing full voice at the start, but by the end Daniel and I are almost whisper-singing together. I’ve never treated my voice as a dynamic instrument before.
Webber: It’s been cool to see you as an elder-thirties person finding your voice. It’s really rad
What do you want the ideal listener taking away from how we dig in the earth?
Sooy: The core demographic and the person who’d stumble onto the record aren’t the same. Maybe they’d still find something to enjoy. I think the core demographic is a pure-hearted person in pain. Someone cynical will relate to the record cynically, I think. I can’t control that. I can try and get them to feel something true without irony or cynicism. We’ve leaked the record to some folks who’ve opened up with their own experiences going through a miscarriage, how the record tore them open in a good way and helped put them back together. That was one of our main ambitions–can this help someone who’s lost a kid, who didn’t get their deepest hoped-for thing? I think there’s a lot to enjoy, though, even if you haven’t felt that pain or even if you aren’t pure of heart.
Webber: Everyone’s undergone great pain.
Sooy: There’s also a pure heart inside every cynic. Someone who’s fucking going through it is who I want to encourage.
Webber: I think we tried to be responsive to the songs. At the end of the day this was what we felt we were supposed to do.
Sooy: We think it’s easy listening despite that.
Webber: I hope it can be a record that can help someone through a hard time in their life.
how we dig in the earth is out Friday, November first.
—
Zac Djamoos | @gr8whitebison
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