Since their early days rehearsing above a strip club called Pumps, Boyish’s India Shore and Claire Altendahl have worked together like a gas station coffee and donut – the perfection combination. But Gun marks the first album they have made in a studio and on a tape machine, not an apartment on a laptop. Alongside Loren Humphrey (Cameron Winter, Lana Del Rey), they produced the record fully analog, with no click tracks and just five instruments, during two months spent in the uncanny village of Tuxedo Park, NY.
In this conversation with India and Claire, we explore the “town” of Gun as a physical place, a cinematic narrative, and a creative partnership, tracing how they built a fictional world while protecting both their art and their business as an independent duo.
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YOU’VE DESCRIBED YOUR LATEST WORK NOT JUST AS AN ALBUM, BUT AS A PHYSICAL PLACE. FOR SONGWRITERS WHO FEEL STUCK WRITING ABOUT THEIR OWN LIVES, HOW DOES CREATING A FICTIONAL "SETTING" OR TOWN HELP OPEN UP NEW LYRICAL DOORS?
One of the first things we did when we started this album was envision a setting that had the same emotion we were trying to achieve, and to do that we started watching a ton of movies and paid attention to the ones that resonated with this emotion we were striving for. When we were starting a song, we could feel pretty early on if it belonged in this setting we had dreamed up. Lyrically though, I don’t think we wrote so much to the town as we did to the characters. The reason Wendy is brought up so much is that I found it really easy to write these thoughts and feelings I was having to someone else. At the start of writing this album, before we even had names for these characters, I already found myself writing to someone else, but I wasn’t sure who that was.
YOUR MUSIC FEELS INHERENTLY CINEMATIC. IT'S EASY TO IMAGINE IT SCORING A FILM. WHEN YOU’RE WRITING ABOUT THE TOWN OF GUN, ARE YOU 'SEEING' SCENES PLAY OUT IN YOUR HEAD?
We weren’t so much imagining the scenes while writing the songs, and anytime we did do that it ended up feeling really on the nose. The process was more putting all the pieces together once we had the songs and the story revealed itself.
YOU’VE MENTIONED THAT GUN HAS A CHRONOLOGICAL STORY. AS SONGWRITERS, HOW DO YOU BALANCE MAKING A SONG WORK AS A "CHAPTER" IN A LARGER BOOK WHILE ENSURING IT STILL HITS HOME FOR A LISTENER WHO MIGHT ONLY HEAR THAT ONE TRACK ON A PLAYLIST?
It’s interesting, when we would start writing a song, we never tried to force it into a specific chapter or use it to get from point A to point B in our story, it just sort of unconsciously wrote itself. Everything was written out of order, "BIG" was the first song we wrote, then "Jumbos," then "Prom," so we sort of wrote the beginning and end first, and from there we followed the emotion of the song after it was finished and looked to see where it fit into the story. But we found if we sat down and said “Okay we need to write a song about our characters doing this specific thing,” it turned very musical theater, very fast.
THE FINAL TRACK, "WENDY II," WAS RECORDED LIVE IN A SINGLE TAKE. AFTER AN ALBUM FILLED WITH "WALLS OF GUITARS" AND INTRICATE PRODUCTION, WHY WAS IT IMPORTANT TO STRIP EVERYTHING AWAY FOR THE CONCLUSION OF CLAIRE AND WENDY'S STORY?
Well, I think because it was just them left at the end!
YOU USED ALMOST NO PLUG-INS ON THIS RECORD, OPTING FOR ANALOG GEAR. WHAT WAS ONE SPECIFIC PIECE OF GEAR OR A "HAPPY ACCIDENT" IN THE STUDIO THAT DEFINED THE SOUND OF A SPECIFIC CHARACTER OR SCENE IN THE TOWN?
The tape machine itself gave us a lot of happy accidents, one of my favorite mistakes is at the very end of "Wendy II," we forgot to erase the tape we were recording on and ended up recording over some B-roll of us playing around in the studio with some guitar effects, but it lined up perfectly with the outro theme that we were recording at the time. We had a similar thing happen in between the intro theme ("5 Miles to Gun") and "BIG," it sounds like lasers but its the sound of the tape machine starting up.
YOU’VE MENTIONED THAT IF A GUN IS ON THE WALL AT THE START OF A PLAY, IT HAS TO GO OFF BY THE END, AND YOUR ALBUM LITERALLY ENDS WITH A GUNSHOT. WHEN WRITING A NARRATIVE PROJECT, HOW DO YOU DECIDE WHICH MOTIFS (LIKE THE RECURRING LYRIC "YOU AND I DON’T WANNA DIE BUT WE DON’T WANT TO SUFFER") SHOULD RETURN AT THE END TO TIE THE WHOLE STORY TOGETHER?
That was another spur of the moment thing that happened. Claire just sang it while we were writing prom, and that’s when everything else clicked in to place as well.
YOU RECENTLY FINISHED A RUN OF SHOWS (INCLUDING DATES WITH THE BEACHES AND HEADLINE SLOTS). HOW DID THE CINEMATIC NATURE OF GUN TRANSLATE TO THE STAGE?
We made it very dramatic. We started every show with a thunderstorm and then ran through the whole album start to finish. We brought windchimes with us too. It was funny, it started to feel kind of art rock which we weren’t expecting. My dad said “wow it’s very avant garde”, which was not the intention hahahaha
HAS THE "AMERICAN TOWN" OF GUN RESONATED DIFFERENTLY WITH FANS OVERSEAS?
I feel like maybe more. I think London and Koln were the most enthusiastic crowds throughout the entire tour. Also Hamburg, but we played at 1 am at a festival and everyone was drunk, so hard to tell if the enthusiasm was real.
FOR SONGWRITERS CURRENTLY WORKING OUT OF HOME STUDIOS, WHERE DO YOU RECOMMEND THEY SPEND THEIR LIMITED BUDGET TO GET THE BIGGEST "CINEMATIC" JUMP IN THEIR SOUND?
The first things I bought with my COVID stimulus checks when we were building up our home studio was a nice interface and a nice microphone! And we have used the same interface (Apollo Twin) and microphone (AKG 414) on all of our records and EPs including Gun. And then next would be a pair of monitors to hear playback on. When we made Garden Spider we didn’t own any monitors and we would pass back and forth a pair of headphones.
YOU TWO WENT FROM "STRICTLY BUSINESS PARTNERS" AT BERKLEE TO A DEEP CREATIVE PARTNERSHIP. HOW DO YOU HANDLE THE "BUSINESS" SIDE OF YOUR SONGWRITING (SUCH AS SONG SPLITS) TO KEEP THE CREATIVE ENERGY PROTECTED?
50/50 baby, even though each persons contributions to specific songs might vary, it all balances out in the end and we’re both so involved in all of it.
AS AN INDIE DUO WHOSE MUSIC IS NOW TRAVELING GLOBALLY THROUGH TOURS AND STREAMING, WHEN DID YOU REALIZE YOU NEEDED A PUBLISHING ADMINISTRATOR LIKE SONGTRUST TO HELP HANDLE YOUR ROYALTIES BEYOND THE U.S.?
There are few things in life that confuse me quite like trying to track down your royalties. It has been so important to have Songtrust help us because otherwise we would spend so much of our time and energy on administrative stuff and not on focusing on the music. Where royalties come from and how to get them is one of lifes great mysteries.
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