[Interview with Riley, May 2023]

J: Let's start with a summary. What have you been working on lately?

R: As a whole, the point of what I do essentially is: There's all this good music in LA, all these people that make music with their bands, and when there's a band I like, I talk to them about it. But something has to really speak to me about it. What I have been doing recently is finishing up the Trevor's Everywhere EP, which has been a long process, and also finishing up the Swandive Album, which has been a really long time. What's interesting about the Swandive records is they take such a long amount of effort and checking that everyone likes what we're doing. It's a whole process.

J: I can tell from listening to a lot of the Swandive stuff that there are a lot of different parts to it. It's like, what's the expression, a well-oiled machine or something?

R: Yeah, it is because we've all been playing together a lot of our lives.

J: It feels very put together.

R: The amount of times we've gone into a rehearsal and made a song that we spent three hours on, and it never makes it on the album because it's just not good enough, or, we’ll really try to make a good record that doesn't happen. Like with those records, everything is so meticulously put together. The process for us, especially because we're all so busy, almost everything takes so much time. Our first album took over two years to make because of COVID and stuff. We were recording it on our own, but it just took ages. It was a real long process. This time we're just trying to meet up weekly, writing a song. We've been doing that. I've also been working with Addie a bunch and also just trying to make more music on my own, not because I have any ambitions with it, but because I'm used to only writing with other people.

J: Yeah, it's good to get your own ideas. You can also pull ideas from other people.

R: That's where I am. I think the best music is made with at least another brain in the room. At least right now for me, it's hard to really, unless you have a beautiful voice and you're great at guitar, it's like I'm not Sufjan Stevens. No one's Sufjan Stevens.

J: Except Sufjan Stevens.

R: Yeah, right. One day I think I'll get to the point where I can really comfortably make a solo album, but I'm just trying to work that out. But what I'm really trying to focus on is my production for other people and making sure that the best music is made. I think the recording of music is so important. Imagine if a band like Trevor's Everywhere never recorded their music.

J: And then it would just be gone forever.

R: They're so unique. That's a piece of history that isn't there. It's obviously very minuscule history, but when I saw them live, I was like this needs to be tracked down.

J: For the EYEROLL song, I really liked the production. What was the inspiration?

R: That was funny. I-

J: I heard a lot of LCD, some new wave influence.

R: I was talking to Luca Robinson. I was talking with him about it, we wanted to make a song together, and I was listening to a lot of LCD Soundsystem. They're like the best band ever.

J: They are the best band ever.

R: We're talking about it. I wanted to make a song that was really short and I didn't think too much about it. A lot of the stuff I was listening to around that time was circling in that field. So we just got in the studio, made that song in a couple of hours. I worked on it a little bit in the next few days, and it was done. But I think whether or not I do that more in the future, I did it, and it was a really healthy exercise. It was the first time I had written a song on my own and said, ‘I can put this out.’ I wanted to make a direct song. Every Swandive song is like so long and so much shit going on. There's like four tracks in that song. It's the drum kit.

J: The boop boop bop bop.

R: Right, there's the stupid fucking synth lead.

J: It's stupid, but in a good way. It works so well. It's one of those things that would be so stupid if it wasn't in that song.

R: Yes, that was the first thing we tracked. We quantized the shit out of it, so it got all fucked up. That's kind of the point of the song. I wanted to make a song I didn't think about too much. With Swandive, there are so many instruments you have to worry about. With that, we're just gonna make one idea, a couple of verses, a couple of choruses, call it a day. It was a really healthy exercise. Make a fun party song. I've never done that before.

J: It feels like there are two sides of what music can be. One of them is that fun party song—you're being such an eye roll!—it’s fun and you can dance to it. And there's Swandive, which is so complex, and you can also dance to it, but it's so much more, and it takes a long time to build up. It's cool that you can do both of those, that you know how to do both.

R: It's really the difference between writing about something personal and writing something that applies to everyone else. That song was kinda born out of me. I hate when people are bullshit people and just waste time. The whole Swandive Album, the first one, is about me just getting mad at people for wasting time and bullshitting. Which is why every song is like a noise rock song, I'm just ‘ahhh kill everyone’. Now with the new record, it's much more introspective. It’s a whole thing. That song, “Don't Fuck Around,” I can't believe I made that song. It's crazy.

J: I like it a lot.

R: Thank you.

J: What's the deeper meaning of the last Swandive album, the last one. Is there anything else you can add? I wanna hear more about that.

R: Of course, do you mean the songs or the title or—

J: The title, the lyrics, the music, all of it.

R: So, I'll start with the title. I started writing that album in my freshman year of high school with the band. COVID happened, whatever, and the album was like half-written. We had some of it written and then the band couldn't really exist for a while, so I taught myself to learn all this stuff, and I went through all these life experiences as everyone did. When you’re in your early stages of high school there’s all these decisions you have to make, as with any point in life, but you’re really trying to figure yourself out. I felt like a very stressed person. I really like the word standoff, that’s part of it, Standoff at a Yellow Light, it feels very pretentious, which it is. The song titles actually came after the album title. It’s a different way of talking about making very important decisions in a short amount of time. Imagine you’re at a cross section and you’re about to shoot someone or something. And youre like, “Oh shit, now the car's about to go,” That’s what I was thinking.

J: That’s pretty funny, I was just imagining the standoff being like you’re at a yellow light and you don’t know if you can make it or not.

R: Yeah, it’s the same vibe.

J: It's the same vibe except intense, it's Swandive, it's rock, it's noisy.

R: A lot of the album, even songs like “Nonagon,” which we wrote before the title existed, definitely apply. That whole song, “I'm standing here, not moving”, that chorus is just about the hatred of stagnation; wanting to move on with life and progress. When there's people holding you back from that, you're like, “Ah I’m gonna claw on everyone.”

J: I love the name Nonagon, it's the 9 from the, “take 9 years, improving,’’ and it's taking the space of time of 9 years and making it sound sick.

R: Exactly, and 9 years is such an uncomfortable time frame because it's not ten.

J: That's so true.

R: Because of that song, and because it's the opener, I wanted to make the album nine songs, but it never got there. It also hit 46 minutes with eight songs.

J: Wow.

R: Like, we're gonna cut it.

J: Is Red Eye about planes? Or is it about getting high?

R: It's actually about planes.

J: It’s really about planes? That's cool.

R: I'm historically not a smoker or anything, I don't do drugs, but I have a storied history with planes. As a kid growing up, it was a very stressful experience for me. When you're on a plane you're so left alone with your thoughts and it's easy to enjoy it, but at the same time, in the past, I mean you’ve (Taylor) seen me on planes in the past. I used to have a real hard time. That's part of it. The whole last half of that song is about relationship shit, but the first half, which is what youre talking about, is just about planes and how it's such an isolating experience.

J: It's very personal but it's also very down to earth, it's something a lot of people have: people don't like planes, people also don't like being isolated.

R: I like that people think it's about being high though. Being high is such a visceral experience in a way, and if that's what's connecting, then that's great.

J: It definitely serves as a good metaphor if that's someone's interpretation. You can take off in a plane, and then you come down.

R: It's the same thing. What's why when people ask me that I'm like, “It's up to you.”

J: That last part of Red Eye, where it's like, “Ohhh” I can never tell if I was hallucinating this, but did you take that “Ohhh” and make it extend and fade out?

R: I didn't do that, Henry did.

J: But it is like a loop and then it fades?

R: Yeah.

(High Five)

J: That was so cool. I loved that.

R: That was all Henry, he mixed a lot of that album.

J: That was my favorite part of the album

R: I thought it was cool when he did that, we just wanted to make the ending of that song super noisy and shoegaze-y, it's the closest we ever got to shoegaze. I love that part, it's great.

J: That was great. You guys have played a lot of venues. How has that experience been, dealing with venues and stuff?

R: With venues and stuff, we started really playing venues at the beginning of junior year. We were thinking, if we wanna get to bigger ones, we have to start at the bottom, so we went to The Mint. [Laughs]

R: So I emailed The Mint. It was our first show, but we got 200 people in there.

J: That's crazy.

R: So people liked us. And we’re like, “Okay, party time.” I had been emailing venues for years because I was managing Swandive, and I reached out to any venue I could think of. At this point, we got asked to open for Laundry Day. We got there, and it was a sold out show, like 500 people. Obviously, that “pull” wasn't us at that show, that was Laundry Day. But the benefit was, we could say, “Hey! We've played at the Roxy.” That experience was great.

J: How did that come about, playing with Laundry Day?

R: We knew someone that had a connection and Laundry Day had posted on their instagram that they wanted local bands to open, so we reached out, and they were like “Yeah, Perfect.” It’s interesting that they let us play because we're such a different band than them. We’re objectively louder than they were.

J: Objectively a lot louder.

R: But it was great, and once you play those big venues, the hospitality is so great and they really help you out. We did that, and once you can get The Roxy on your email, it gets the tables turning. The biggest one was when we emailed the Lodge Room and we got a show there.

J: That's one of my favorite venues

R: It's the best.

J: It's the best. They haven't been bought by Live Nation either, right?

R: I don't think so.

J: That's good too.

R: There's the Lodge Room, and then like 300 people came, and it's a 500 person venue, so that's enough. They’re profiting off that. Up until that it was great, and once we went back to The Mint and The Smell that shit was not that great because once, The Mint, they kicked us off stage when it's time to play, and we’re like headlining for them, it's annoying. But the reason we play venues is because we're not gonna get shut down. We have a joke in the band, we can never finish a show in the informal sector, because we always get shut down and we play last. It's a big joke for us. We like playing venues, it means we can put on our own production. I think Swandive shows at this point deserve a good presentation because we've played for such a long time.

J: Swandive shows have a reputation of having this crowd that just wants to move, they love the songs, they just wanna hit each other to them, they wanna jump around. That's what Swandive shows do, a lot of them. A lot of it is a building up and a-

R: A release.

J: A release.

R: I just think at this point, if we can keep playing these venues it's great. The Lodge Room shows have been really beautiful because it's so supportive, everyone there is so nice. it's also, when people go there, it really shows that everyone who came there loves us. They came from the other side of LA, you know Highland Park is far.

J: From the Hamilton area, it is.

R: Right, obviously for you, you're here [in Silverlake], it's a ten-minute, fifteen-minute drive, give or take. But for a lot of people, they're making their way to Highland Park to see the show and that means a lot. Whenever we we play that and 300 people come, we’re like, “That fucking rocks!” And it's really nice we can play for a while. I reached out to the Troubadour, and that's like, that's the Troubadour. it's the same size as the Lodge room really.

J: But it's also the Troubadour.

R: Right, and they said, “You're gonna have to guarantee you'll get us 300 people.” And we’re like “of course,” so we did. And I just like it, we play house shows all the time, but the venue shows, we make sure everyone’s getting what they paid for. We try to make it a big production because I think what we do is important and I like to make it matter.

J: Yeah I agree, it's cool. That's the thing about house shows: it's kind of a gamble, you never know if it's gonna happen the way it's supposed to. Can you tell me about the process of the Addie Alaimo album? Because I loved that album. I heard everyone talking about Addie Alaimo - is that how you say it?

R: Yeah.

J: I listened to it, and I was like, “This is awesome.”This is a high schooler? Oh word.

R: Me and Addie have been friends our whole lives basically. We played in a band together in middle school, and it was fine. For middle school, it was great. That band ended, and we didn't make music for a while, but we were still best friends. There's one day in I wanna say 2021, early ‘21, where she said, “Hey Riley, I made this song. Lemme send it to you, and you can help me with it.” It was very vague. At the time I had been getting into recording, I had basically taught myself how to record music over quarantine, because what else can I do? And I had this urge to produce music. There's this video of Jack Antonoff making “Don’t Take the Money,” which is a Bleachers song.

J: I used to like the Bleachers a lot.

R: There's this song, and I didn’t listen to them at all before this, I didn't know this song, and I saw this video. It was an awakening for me, I was like, “This is what I need to be doing.” He's all alone, but he can make this amazing pop song in his room. And I just fell in love with that idea. So, when Addie sent me this, I was like perfect, we're gonna make a song. So, the first song she sent to me was “Me Myself And”, and I was like, ‘Great’. We made most of that song in one day in June of ‘21 and it didn't come out until 11 months later. But, basically every song on that record, for the most part, was her voice and chords. She barely knew how to play guitar, it was from learning singer-songwriter tunes that she liked, everyone’s Twenty One Pilots phase.

J: Everyone’s been there.

R: Exactly. So she sent me this, and I said, “This is great.” What I would do with the chords and the voices, I’d hear it, and I’d say, “There’s some parts of this I think we should keep to the true folk form,” but there are other parts where I said, “let's make this Rock” With “Me Myself And,” it's just this very winding ba da da da da, very meandering, but I thought, when she hit that second chorus, we need to put a beat to this. It's general producer shit, but my contribution is I record 90% of the instrumentation and I try and make it so what she lacked in musicianship, would be emphasized through my job. And that's what the role of a Producer is to me: Just filling the gap, making the spots that an artist can’t do, possible.

J: That's what I think is so cool about what you do. Everyone has ideas, but it's so much harder to really put them together. I have like 300 songs that aren't finished cause I'm just so jumbled. But to be able to really have the mind to put that all together, it's great.

R: 100%, and some of the Addie tunes that she made were fine as they were. There was a song called "Cahuenga," and she was like, “I have these chords and this falsetto,” She had the lyrics, and she sent the song to me, and I said, ‘We don't need to do anything to this. I'll add a guitar harmony and double-track her vocals, and we'll call it a day.” But there were other songs like "Haystack," for example-

J: That's my favorite song. I love it so much.

R: Just a voice memo. It was her second song she wrote. I can't even imagine that song being anything other than it is now because it's like a rock song.

J: I could hear that, like, on the charts or something. That's the song I heard at Ava's Birthday. It's not like it was so sad or anything, but it was just so good that I almost cried. I just love it. And then I listened to it on streaming, and the guitar part is amazing, and the chorus, the melody is amazing.

R: Yeah, I heard this swaying groove in that song. And I mean the way that pre-chorus is arranged, the way the pre-chorus goes into the chorus, in my brain, when I hear her voice memos, I see the vision with this, I know where it needs to go. So I was like, “We're gonna make a fully arranged pop song with this.” And we did. I remember just hearing the groove, and originally I was thinking this could be one of those new wave tunes, like Tears for Fears, or like that one Paramore song.

J: I hear a little bit of Tears for Fears on the guitar.

R: Right, and I heard that vibe in it. The other songs, I totally didn't hear. I heard a simple barren arrangement of everything else. There's another song on the record called "Guitar Players Always Win," that song is like 7 minutes long. She sent me the chords, and it was very spaghetti western. She sent it to me saying, “I'm just gonna make this very simple,” I was like, “No, this needs to be a fucking disco song, dude,” and we did it. And I put in all these guitar parts. I've never worked harder. So much shit's going on, and it's so powerful. It's the amount of power you hear from Addie's tunes that make it work. So, in short, my role in that record was hearing the simple arrangements of those songs and bringing the extra spirits around it to a physical form, making it a fully tangible song. There's so much potential in what she is. When I work with her now, she's so much more proficient in writing songs than she used to be. Our minds are racing, and they feel so much more realized. I don't have to do as much stuff as I used to do now that we have such a good mental connection with music. It's like what playing with Swandive feels like at this point. We can just get in a room and make stuff.

J: So what are you doing next year?

R: I'm moving to New York to study Music Production at NYU. One thing about music school and college that I think is worth noting, is that at least if you wanna make it into a professional music industry-related career, a G chord is a G chord wherever you learn it, whether you go to Cleveland, Seattle, or New York or whatever. Everyone's gonna teach you the same music theory. It's all the same shit. It's the connections and the people you meet that really matter. To me, a Songwriting major doesn't make a lot of sense because it's just something you get better at the more you do. I love and respect people that do that.

R: Yeah, Songwriting is such a personal thing anyway, so people could teach you the best ways to do chords and do whatever, but I think the more people you meet, the more people you work with, cause collaboration is the most beautiful thing ever. I just think that's important. So the reason I'm going for Production is so I can meet other Songwriters and meet other people and just help make records, make it my life. So it's not an extra thing, it's what I do. I mean, LA is the best city for music, objectively, if you wanna make a music career and you can afford to live in LA. And you wanna meet people, LA is the best city. But I think why college is great, I think I've done enough work in LA for the time being, people know me here, I wanna get New York down 'cause New York is such a center for weird shit. You can go to New York and be anything.

J: You can tell when you go to New York, you walk down the street and think, “Wow, this person could do whatever.”

R: Everyone has a really specific interest, and they just wanna pursue it. I'm just covering both my bases basically. I know that if I go there, I'm gonna have access to studios and I'm gonna have access to people that also like music, and I'm just gonna try and write and record more music. For this year, before I go to New York, there's gonna be three other projects that came out that I've produced: The Swandive record, the Trevors Everywhere record, and the Addie EP that we're about to do. It's almost finished. And from there, I'm just gonna try and keep doing that shit.

J: That's awesome.

R: I just think, again, in our scene, the recording of music is so underrated. Live music is great, but everyone goes throughout their day, listening to shit, listening to their own music, but all these bands are great.

J: And then a lot of them don't have anything out there.

R: Right, and it doesn't seem like this on the surface but there's so much merit in bands like Saint Ivy.

J: Saint Ivy is great. They don’t have anything recorded.

R: They don’t have anything recorded, and I think they’re working on it, and I’ve always wanted to ask them to work together. But they have such a sound. I think the value of recording whatever we have in the scene is so beautiful, because soon enough it won't be there anymore. And Addie is like the opposite because when we record her music I’m like, “We have to get you to play a gig.” It’s the same thing.

J: Yeah so you have to find the balance of recording and live music.

R: Of course, I just think what we have is so special here. And if no ones gonna cover the recording part of it, I wanna be the one to do it.

J: That's great, filling that spot.

R: Right, and I love that when I work with these artists I learn so much about how to write music. When I work with Trevors Everywhere, it's not like they’re shredding on every song, they’re playing super simple shit, but it’s their arrangement, it's the length of their songs and the ambition they have, that I just learn things that I never think about. When I write with Swandive, we’re all so crazy about these crazy riffs and-

J: And the noise.

R: Swandive is about to put out a song next month that's like the poppiest song ever.

J: I think I know which one you’re talking about.

R: It could be a Swandive song, it could be a fucking boy band song. We’re gonna put it out next month.

J: Swan Direction.

R: That song is the result of me working with people like Addie, or the result of me working with Trevor’s Everywhere. You work with them and you realize, some things don’t have to be so crazy. Trevor’s Everywhere has a song called Sweet Song, a lot of it is two notes, and it’s awesome. It's just an arrangement. You learn so much, and I think it’s great.

J: Do you have anything else to say about the Trevor’s Everywhere upcoming release?

R: They’re just the most unique band. When I see them live, it's like holy shit, I’ve never seen someone perform like this. I mean they’re two people, they’re handling all this shit and they’re trying all these things, and my job as a Producer for them is to wrangle in all of the shit going on and make a great song out of it. Because sometimes in their set, we’re like five minutes into this “wcheewoo!”’ and it's sweet, but I just wanna make every song as punchy as possible, while still preserving the weirdness. I think what I bring when I produce records is I love the weird shit, but I’m also such a big pop music fan, and I wanna make everything as snappy and catchy as a pop song. That’s why when people hear the Swandive album they’re gonna say, this is so much catchier than the last one. I’ve become such a pop music head. But I still love hardcore, and experimental music. I think Trevor’s Everywhere goes through that line so well. There’s songs on their record that are seven minutes long, and super ambient and spoken wordy, but there’s other ones where it’s just groovy fun time.

J: Groovy fun time!

R: I think the importance of bringing their music to life is one of the most essential things I can do in recording the scene.

J: That’s great. Do you have any conclusions, anything you want the readers to hear?

R: Stay tuned for the new Swandive record, it’s gonna rock. Keep seeing live music, I’m producing music all the time, you can listen to all the stuff I’ve done, with Addie and Trevor’s Everywhere soon.

J: Stay tuned.