An Interview With Harrison Whitford & Marshall Vore

Following our Halloween party interview with the one and only Phoebe Bridgers, our online editors Nick and Jack had the opportunity to sit down with Harrison Whitford and Marshall Vore to discuss everything from the intricate nuances of songwriting to the devastating impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had on local music communities. With Harrison calling in from the comfort of his California home and Marshall dialing in from the infinite void of space, it was bound to be an engaging conversation.

Nick Gemma: With writing for different voices and your voice and across different genres, how do you approach those different nuances in the music when writing, both in the lyrics and the production of a song?

Marshall Vore: I actually think there’s two to three different pillars of what makes music to me. One of them is the performance and the music itself and the other would be the songwriting, literally the song bare-bones on its own, not necessarily with any genre; by that I mean you could just play a song on a mandolin, or a piano, or a distorted guitar, or a synth. Then there’s the production side of it which I think ultimately just determines genre. But when I start with music, and I think about this with production too - the first place I start with is just what is the song on its own.  You could take a song - as long as the song itself is not made mostly of instruments and ambient things like maybe some Radiohead or Aphex Twin that really has nothing to do with songs - and you can play them or produce them in any way. So when I think about listening to songs, which I am by and large more interested in than the other elements, I start with just wanting a really great song that stands on its own two feet without the help of any kind of production and necessarily even any performances. A good example of that is Daniel Johnston, where the instruments are really out of tune and the lyrics are really out of pitch but the songs shine through that and ultimately his weirdness and quirks with the way that he does perform created its own kind of genre. You could play a Daniel Johnston song in any way from being a heavy song, to a pop song, to a folk song, to probably even a reggae song or something. That’s just you choosing the avenue you want the art to be communicated through. But that also means that when I listen to any song-based music, it’s completely the same to me. So I’ll listen to pop stuff, and I’ll listen to Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, and then I’ll listen to “Money Machine” by 100 gecs and I don’t see a huge difference between them other than the way that they’re presented and the voice of the writer - which brings you to the lyric part of it. The voice of the writer is really where people define themselves as artists - at least to me when I’m listening to them. I want someone’s personality and who they are to come through more than I want it to come through as the choices of instruments or arrangements and stuff like that. When I hear someone like Lucy Dacus who has a very specific voice, or someone like Phoebe, or even someone in a completely different genre too. Some of my favorite artists have nothing to do with the indie or bedroom pop thing. My girlfriend, Ruby, is introducing me to SZA and those are some of my favorite recordings. Ultimately, they’re songs that are presented in the way that SZA chose but she has a very strong voice, and that’s so compelling to me. Whether I’m listening to SZA or Joyce Manor I’m sucked into their world and the way that they see things, so when I make songs, whether it’s with Phoebe or someone else, I’m trying to pull out who I am and what is the self-discovery of this. What way am I looking at the world or a situation and getting as specific as possible because that really brings you into my world through my lens and I think that has a value and that’s what I look for in songs. 

Harrison Whitford: Running with that, I feel like something that can happen with music a lot too is that people hear a songwriter or a record and they hear the sounds of the record and they think ‘well I wanna do that’ and work on making something that’s approaching that sonic aesthetic. For example, I think about this with Phoebe’s music, because if you listen to Phoebe’s records they can be tracks that have so many layers and it never gets away from the song. I have definitely been in recording scenarios before where a track is getting out of control because it's almost drowning the song - starting from the outside in, rather than from the inside out. Which I think is what you’re saying; that if a song is quality, it's memorable and good from the beginning, you can’t really mess it up. I think that it's that and as well sometimes there’s just an intangible quality to music that is really good too you know. That might just be what feeling inspired is like and I know that the best music I have ever been a part of was coming from an inspired place. Not to say that you can’t labor over something and it won’t be good but the laboring needs to come from the right place. It's also so case by case with music too. It's like you said where all music is not that dissimilar. If you listen to really heavy crazy jazz records it's still all melodies but they’re all organized in a way that’s really tense. It's still the same thing. 

Marshall: Or you listen to something like Miles Davis and what they’re doing is writing songs with melodies.

Harrison: Yeah it’s all melodies.

Marshall: That Kind of Blue album is really a songwriter album more than it is a free album because it has a lot of motifs that repeat and pretty familiar structures. When you have a song that stands on its own two feet in that weird amorphous way you can do really cool and fun things like record it with a piano and sing a vocal to it. But then you can get rid of the piano and make all kinds of weird, strange, ambient, counterintuitive choices and the song remains.

Jack Barnes: So when and how do you find time to make music for yourselves with all of the touring you’re doing with Phoebe? Do you consider the work with Phoebe an extension of your own work?

Harrison: I definitely feel like any time that I’m playing music it's for me, I like the opportunity to learn something about playing music no matter what it is. I also feel pretty lucky that I’m generally in situations where I like the music that I’m playing; I know a lot of musicians who can’t say that. I feel like lately, this year at least, I’m just enjoying playing guitar and not overthinking things. I feel like it's been a healthier zone for me, to not overthink things. Also with music, whether it’s productions or playing or singing it's such a long process of getting better at it in little increments here and there. For me at least it always feels like a really incremental, slow process of getting better. 

Marshall: For me, I feel like for the last four years of my life the musical centerpiece has been making the Phoebe music and touring it, and then the things that I have been doing outside of that were things that I could with free will when we weren’t touring or we weren’t working on something with Phoebe. We were about to start touring but after Stranger in the Alps it felt like there was a ton of time all of a sudden. Then I felt like maybe I could focus on another project or two that I could schedule and make more serious. I did that with another songwriter and we wrote 17 songs, and I basically unpacked learning how to produce music by doing it for and with this person. I make sure that the main centerpiece in my life is still making the Phoebe music and I want to be involved with that, it’s probably my favorite music that I make, and so I make sure that’s a priority and I do other things when there’s time. There is lots of time right now, but we’re also really limited in what we’re able to do - obviously because of COVID. It’ll be interesting to see if Phoebe decides at some point in her life to take a 5-year musical break, it’ll be interesting to see what I make the centerpiece in my life and to what degree that changes how I do things or how I think about things. That’s the way I’m thinking about it right now. 

Nick: We saw you performing at SaveOurStagesFest, have there been any venues that you were fond of that you have seen close down? What other changes that you have seen with the creation, production, and sharing of music amid the pandemic? 

Marshall: There’s one venue here that we really almost make fun of because of how much of a role it plays in our lives. I’ve been off social media for a few weeks so I don't know how it’s doing now but I remember it was not doing well. There was some talk that it might have to close. I know for a fact that olifether awesome venues have closed but I can’t for the life of me remember which ones I’m thinking of right now. Obviously, you guys in Boston had Great Scott close and that was an institution for you because it was also a mixer, like our place which is called The Bootleg. I think Great Scott played a similar role because if you started a band and you wanted a place to play it wasn’t out of your reach. You could play there and you could book a show there. But it also saw some pretty legitimate bands come through so it would allow you to plug into an established music scene in your community which is really important. Bootleg is definitely that here, I don’t know anyone that doesn’t play there and it's an awesome place. If that survives COVID it will be just short of a miracle, but if it doesn’t survive that’s going to be pretty sad. There’s not a lot of people who have the sort of financial disincentive to make a place that’s better than it should be for the amount of money that it makes. More importantly, it takes a lot of years to become a cultural hub for art, it doesn’t just happen because you build it. That will be lost too, and I know that’s happening all over the country if not all over the world. I do think, to go into the second part of that question about how the COVID world has informed making art, I don’t think that it’s a bad thing being able to do live stream things or even having people be more familiar with Zoom and be able to do interviews like this that we might not have been able to or even consider doing in this fashion before. It's pretty cool, and it's really early days for it. There are not a lot of high production live stream shows - there’s not a lot of high production remote anything - and I think that better quality live streams are going to become more accessible to more people. They’re going to gain access to more people in earlier stages in their careers and that’s going to be really cool. Then it will allow people to collaborate and write songs and send stuff back and forth from distant places. You might see art being created that I don’t think would have been made before. 

Harrison: As far as venues closing and the state of music this year, I’ve definitely opted for a little bit of willful ignorance. It can get stressful to pay attention to these things which you just can’t control at all. Then I weigh out, I parse how much I need to be paying attention to things I can’t control. The fate that it looks like these things are heading for is grim. There’s an element where I’ve been on this trip for the last year of my life where I’m like “what is good for me?” I’ve been getting more about that because I feel if that’s the place I’m in I generally live a better life. I think the thing I miss most is just the consistency of playing music with people, so I found myself in these live stream sessions that have popped up here and there, I felt really jazzed to do those things. It’s easy when you’re touring two months at a time to get really sick of it, especially if you’re not sleeping at all and living the lifestyle part of it. When that part is not fun, you can start to take it for granted. So lately I've been noticing how much I took the frequency of playing music with people for granted. So now when stuff does come up I’m just super excited about it and I’m trying to think about holding on to that more or nurturing that more. I have a lot of friends that I talk to that send me stuff that they’re working on, and for me it goes back to, with how gnarly and depressing the music industry is right now, everyone I know that is a musician is still making music at home. That never stops, because when you take all the femoral stuff away that’s the most fun part is just making music with people.

Marshall: Don’t tell the labels that we would do it for free.

Jack: That’s exactly what I was going to end on actually. This is a pretty broad one, but how do you balance the business and artistic aspects of being a musician?

Marshall: Oh man, you don’t. I guess I’ve been playing music for so long unsuccessfully that I think at some point in my life I just completely gave up on there even being a business side of it. So when there is, instead of it being some type of unfair thing, I’m like “oh cool, there’s some type of infrastructure to this.” The only thing I don’t like about the music business side is when music business people try to get involved with the creative process. In some ways, you have trust in people that you work with and you want to get their opinions, but I think art is almost always better when it is a single person’s vision because that allows it to have the most personality. The more people that get involved, you end up with more compromise, whether that’s in a big way or a small way you end up watering down what is inside of a person. There’s so much of that, but I don’t think that we experience that as much. We’re in a pretty Indie music situation, but even when it comes down to picking a single to release or picking artwork - like somebody in their bedroom putting out how they want to put their foot forward without having a label or a publicist pushing back and being like “we don’t think this will work because the radio stations like songs this long or this short.” You ever have a song you really like or artwork you really like and you show it to your friend thinking they're going to be stoked but they don’t really like it? And instead of you being like “oh this isn’t good” you’re like “oh, you don’t get it. This isn’t for you I guess.” Which isn’t an arrogance thing, it’s just that not everything that’s being made is for everyone - and when you try to please as many people as possible you end up being like fuckin’ Maroon 5 or something. When you end up trying to compete with yourself and make yourself think something is really cool, then you find like-minded people that are like “whoa this is really awesome.” I think the music business is bad in that way. In terms of deals and how to make a living, I don’t really even understand how that works even though I’m doing it. I feel like you just take what you can get when you can get it and you’re happy doing that because in this day and age it’s pretty much a miracle to be able to do that as your job. I’m not saying that that isn’t sad in some ways, because of Spotify and things like that, but that’s just the way that it is. I don’t really think about the music business that much unless it’s a creative thing and I’m like “damn it they’re going to make us do this thing when it would be so much cooler to do this other thing.”

Harrison: This may be an absurd generalization, but I feel like I have a lot of friends in Nashville who are musicians who, maybe just because they’re in Nashville, take the route of trying to get really savvy with what the music business is. It never aids them and usually also results in really uninspired music - which may be an extreme statement to make. I think sometimes it is just saying yes to whatever comes up, that’s how you get by in music. It’s kind of like that same myth of “networking,” but it’s everything that you love or that has ever gotten work is just because someone was like “damn, they play unique, they’re interesting.” I mean I think that there is nepotism obviously and things that are more political that happen, but I think for the most part things have longevity to them just because that somebody is on their own trip and people like that. 

Marshall: Art in general is absolutely brutal with people in terms of “did you make something that people want, or not?” It doesn’t care about how much you meant it, how much it means to you, how much you deserve it - it’s just about whether people want to consume your art or not. And that’s actually a crazy force because you see people make music in their bedrooms in the middle of nowhere who have absolutely no connections whatsoever and they just take off. I’ve seen that happen to bands. Then I’ve been on the other side when somebody has the craziest management company, the craziest record label, the most expensive publicist…

Harrison: And nobody gives a shit.

Marshall: Well I think there’s a marginal amount of success that you get from that and it fades really quickly. You see that so much like this person is “internet famous” or something and then they make something that people talk about for a couple of months and then they're gone because at the end of the day nobody wanted to go home after working all day or going to school all day and listen.

Harrison: I’ve definitely discovered records that are amazing that are bedroom music and I’m wondering: How does nobody know about this? I think the two can line up where somebody’s amazing and they have a team that helps them. I’ve seen situations where somebody has an investor, like $900,000 for this person, and the music’s terrible. Good art is its own currency.

Marshall: I wish I knew that earlier in my life because I spent so much time in bands or trying to play drums or get gigs with people I thought had trajectory. I wish I just knew that all you have to do is be yourself and do the best work you can possibly do and that is the only fighting chance you have. If you do that and you make something compelling out of that, cause you have to do both, you can’t do one or the other; if you do both things, that’s when you finally have something to offer that other people might want to consume - and once you do that then the managers and the labels and the agents and the networking connections will come to you. You don’t have to go looking for them and you don’t have to change yourself for them or make friends that are “beneficial” for you to make - you don’t have to do any of that. I think a lot of people spend time trying to be connected. In terms of just making music and selling it, you spend so much time and effort doing the wrong thing, and you’re probably going to end up having gained a lot less than you thought you were going to gain out of it.