Bellows
Short Interview
Bellows are a folk/indie-rock (aka the genre Dark Magician) band from the hip Brooklyn, New York. The band is the bedroom-pop project of songwriter and producer Oliver Kalb that also features Gabby Smith, Felix Walworth, and Henry Crawford. Bellows is part of the musical collective, The Epoch, and the band shares members with other artists of the collective, such as Eskimeaux and Told Slant.
Like The Microphones and Oregon-based band Typhoon, Bellows is principally a stripped-down folk/pop outfit that swells the scope of their sound by including orchestral sections and frenzied drums behind Kalb’s tender vocals. Take their song “For Rock Dove.” The densely-layered track propels itself like a hurt-but-resolute runner on the last mile of a cross-country course, limp-racing to the finish with their heart hammering. This sound that navigates extremes complements Kalb’s impassioned lyrics, such as the lines to the catchy chorus, which captures imagery of flying-freedom and cumbersome-constraints, asking,
what if like geese we could migrate, migrate
to a place no one follows?
wish I could speak what’s inside me always
I am a bird with a wing of stone
Kalb describes in the following interview, too, that Blue Breath was written after the loss of his grandmother, and themes of loss contrasted with coming-of-age are embedded in many of Blue Breath’s poignant lyrics. For example, a stanza in “For Rock Dove” begins with the imagery of “when we were small” and builds to the line “last night grandma died”:
I remember when we were small
— It’s dark in this cave and we grow without eyes —
But your voice is brave and warm and though we trip and fall we come out on the other side alive
and what a calm feeling!
It’s like we’re dressed up warm cause it’s nearing night
in the part of your voice that broke when you called me on the telephone and told me that last night grandma died
Bellows’s LP Blue Breath was also one of Bob Boilen of NPR’s All Songs Considered favorite records of 2014. Boilen complimented the band, explaining,
What sets Bellows apart from thousands of other guitar-bass-drums bands out there is its heart. Oliver Kalb sings about things that matter to him in ways that matter to me. His sing-song, matter-of-fact phrasing and guitar melodies are memorable, and the harmonies are lovely, with the staying power to drift in my head for days on end.
For fans of The Epoch and bands like The Microphones and Typhoon looking to learn more about Bellows, it is inspiring to say that Oliver Kalb was generous to answer ten short-interview questions about Bellows’ beginning, influences, and performing via Email:
1) Bellows started in a college dorm room — which college, whose dorm room? Could you explain how and when Bellows was born?
I went to Bard College in upstate New York. I shared a dorm room with Felix Walworth in my freshman year (Felix is the drummer in all three of my bands, Bellows, Told Slant & Eskimeaux). Felix and I had been playing in bands together throughout high school, and we chose each other to be college roommates when we found out we were going to Bard together. That year, I bought this USB microphone called the “Yeti” that just plugs right into a laptop and used it to start recording my songs by myself, and also just to experiment with producing and arranging my own music. Felix and I were both getting into subtler music around then — we were both heavily into these two bands called Hello Shark and Attic Abasement, and I was listening to a lot of The Microphones. Over the course of my freshman year, I recorded an album called As If To Say I Hate Daylight that was kind of based around my love of these self-recording DIY bands. It’s a mostly acoustic record that doesn’t use any MIDI or electronics of any kind — I was sort of channeling the feeling of living in the woods that year and trying to create a sort of romantic, naturalistic sound that fit the majestic, mysterious atmosphere of the Hudson Valley.
2) What are your influences (music/books/movies)?
I’m a huge fan of Emily Dickinson and Cormac McCarthy, both of whose writing informed a lot of my lyrics, especially on As If To Say I Hate Daylight and Blue Breath. I think if I were to list off a few bands whose sounds I was emulating pretty heavily in my early music, I’d want to mention Mount Eerie, WHY?, Sufjan Stevens and Xiu Xiu, but over the last two years since recording my newest record Fist & Palm (which is being released this coming fall), my influences have changed a bit. Privately, I’ve been listening to mostly hip-hop, but I think the new record is a lot more introspective than my last two albums. I guess what I mean by that is that it’s more focused on parsing actual problems in my personal life than it is based on emulating the styles of musicians or writers I admire. Percussion plays a major role, maybe subconsciously because of the influence of hip-hop and pop music overwhelming the indie and folk I used to have in my life. Also, I’ve just been trying to get better at distilling my sound and representing emotional climaxes in my songs more intensely. I’m a lot more proud of this next record than I have been of any of my others. I’m excited for everyone to hear it.
3) What inspired Blue Breath? Is there a unifying theme to the album, and, if so, what would you say it is? Explain.
The album is pretty dark thematically. The opening track “For Rock Dove” is kind of an open letter to a friend of mine who was questioning how long he could continue being a songwriter and an artist. The song is trying to tell him to go on, no matter how hard it gets. I was dealing with the death of my grandmother as I was writing Blue Breath, so I think I was kind of parsing how I was affected by the endings of things — the end of life, the looming ending of a music career. I think the album is maybe unduly dramatic at times, but I’m proud of how deeply I was able to explore what it’s like to be a person who always considers himself on a kind of precipice. It sounds ridiculous to type it out, but I think I ascribe a lot of drama to my life in music, and always consider myself to be right on the edge of failing completely. Blue Breath was about channeling those feelings of precariousness and trying to write an album that felt like it was a sort of dirge into complete, abject failure. Lyrics like “you see that I’m naked, I see a pose” are about questioning the honesty of confessional songwriting. “No suicide can bring you dying so hard as you’d find just by staying alive” feels kind of like an acknowledgment of the depths I had pushed myself into emotionally to feel like I had come to grips with the possibility of failing completely. I don’t really feel quite so extreme about things lately, but, at the time, I think I had a pretty all-or-nothing attitude towards being an artist. Maybe crushing anxiety and desperate hope are the running themes of the record.
4) How has your experience been making a living/money from music? How do you view the future of music with the influx of technology and the Internet? Explain.
Well, I quit my day job last year, and I now pay my rent entirely with money from my bands. It’s pretty exhilarating. Touring heavily is the only way to actually make the money work — I probably make around $200 on my Bandcamp a month, a little bit more when I have a new record. I don’t really have an opinion on technology in music. It’s nice to be able to make a living making music.
5) What has been your favorite thing about touring/playing shows? What has been your least favorite thing about touring/playing shows? And is there a memorable experience from a show you’d like to share? Explain.
My favorite thing about playing shows is being aware that there’s a person in the audience whose life was deeply affected by the songs that I’m playing. When it feels like no one in the crowd really knows the songs, and is maybe just there for social reasons, it really bums me out. I’m not a very social person so the whole merch-table spieling side-of-things, and the making-connections side-of-things is something I just totally fail at. I feel really proud of the albums I make and the live-performances that my bands do, so when those things are the focus, I’m really happy. When the other things that are not music-related become the focus I get really depressed.
6) How do you view your relationship with fans? What are ways you like to connect with fans, and do you have a memorable experience with a fan you would like to share? Explain.
I don’t know if I really have a fan-base for Bellows that I’m aware of, but I have become aware of a fan-base for my other bands Told Slant and Eskimeaux, and talk to them at shows when they approach me. They seem like nice people. I think all the bands I’m in make music that people who are, like, assholes or overly masculine bro-dudes, really would hate. So the people who like my bands are usually shy or introspective people that are not so hard to deal with. One really nice fan experience was that a group of kids in Lansing, MI made a fan-zine about my collective The Epoch, where they just wrote about what my bands, and the bands I’m friends with, mean to them. Responding to art with your own art is extremely cool.
7) What were some learning experiences during the recording of Blue Breath?
I learned that you can’t just put a million sounds into a song and expect it to work. Blue Breath was really, really overly-layered, and as a consequence it was very hard to mix. “For Rock Dove” had like 100 tracks or something. I was still learning how to record and I just wanted to put every possible sound into every song. I was very eager. I love the record, but I’m better at choosing sounds a little more carefully now.
8) Your lyrics and sound are pretty unique. Was college influential in the development of your writing and music skills? Did any of you study English or music in school or something like that?
Yeah, I think my classes in college played a pretty major role. I was an English major, and was definitely really into what I was studying. My thesis was on Cormac McCarthy, and I wrote As If To Say I Hate Daylight and Blue Breath while I was reading his novels and writing about him a lot. I read Moby Dick during that time, and was reading a lot of Emily Dickinson’s poems, and was trying to channel some of the gravity of those writers in my lyrics.
9) What are some contemporary music recommendations you would give?
I think Frankie Cosmos’ new album Next Thing is pretty amazing. She distills so many complicated emotions into these 1-minute songs, and they hit you in such a strange, delayed way, kind of like a good poem. The lyrics play on one another in interesting ways and there are just some really weird, brilliant turns-of-phrase that are unique to Greta.
10) What advice would you give to a young artist making music similar to yours who is just starting out today?
That it’s the easiest thing to do! Or rather, really easy to get started, but very hard to be serious about art and develop it. If you wanna be a lo-fi/bedroom-pop/whatever artist, the Internet is your playground — you can be as prolific as you want because you can self-release. You don’t need a record label! But also, that advice is kind of a cliche. It’s been a punk/DIY saying forever that anyone can and should make art. I don’t know if I believe that anyone can and should make art. But I do believe that a lot of people are discouraged from making art for the wrong reasons. There are a lot of people with really interesting brains that are told that art is a waste of time, or that their voice isn’t important, or that somehow their art has to match up to their heroes or it isn’t valuable. Those people’s voices should be elevated. But also a lot of people just waste everyone’s time with a bunch of bullshit. There’s too much music in the world. Some people should be discouraged from clogging up the world with a bunch of schlock. My favorite thing in the world is to see artists develop over time. Watching friends of mine grow from album to album is so amazing to me. I think people who want to grow and develop their art over time, who create a unique language for their craft, are so cool and worthy of praise. I think people that hop on bandwagons and expect that a position in a music scene equals good art, or are content to just rest on a really basic idea and never take it further, are kind of betraying the beautiful artist-listener relationship, which should be symbiotic. I guess my advice would be, make art that you would want to listen to. If you’re able to impress and amaze yourself, you can trust that there are gonna be other people in the world who also love what you’re doing. Respect yourself!
If you liked the article then hit the ❤ button below, and, if you want to support and learn more about Bellows, then check out the links below:
You can like them on Facebook more news about new music and events here.
You can follow them on Twitter here.
You can follow them on Tumblr here.
You can like the musical collective The Epoch here.
Learn more about The Epoch on their Tumblr here.
You can follow Oliver on Instagram here.
