Boyish on Creating and Coming Out - Tunes Tuesday Interview Transcript

Maud: Hi, I'm Maud Mostly, my pronouns are they/them, and welcome back to Tunes Tuesday, a series where I interview queer musicians and bands to talk about their music, their experiences, and much much more. Today I am here with Brooklyn-based alt rock band Boyish. Hi folks, would you like to introduce yourselves?

Claire: Hello, hi I'm Claire, I use they/them or she/hers pronouns.

India: I'm India I use she/her pronouns I'm in Aries and...

C: You’ve got to do your sun, you’ve gotta do your moon..

I: Oh! The whole thing, right. I’m an Aries sun, a Scorpio rising, and a Libra moon.

C: And I'm a Leo sun, I'm a Scorpio moon, and a Sagittarius rising.

M: Amazing!

C: Yeah, and we’re Boyish!

M: Well thank you so much for joining me here today, and the first thing that I'm really excited to talk about is that you recently had your first release of 2021 with your single Superstar, and I've been wondering have you found yourself writing and creating much during these periods of lockdown and isolation?

C: Oh yeah, so much because without shows we had nothing else to do, and in general there's nothing else to do yeah but so for sure.

I: So we wrote the whole ep like from March to, I don't know-

C: Probably like September?

I: September yeah, October so definitely a lot.

C: Yeah it was a four song EP and India- I was in Minnesota at the time when lockdown started and India was out in New York and so it was like three months of remote working where we would just like send each other files and facetime, but it's so hard to write over facetime so eventually I think it was July when India came to Minnesota and that's when we just kind of turned out the whole EP and started recording it and-

I: yeah I think I was there for three months or something I was- I told my mom's like “I'll be back in like a couple weeks” when I was there for three months so.

M: Amazing, well it really shows how much effort and you know, dedication you put into these new releases which is incredible, and you know that takes me to another recent event is that the one year anniversary of your sophomore album Garden Spider recently passed. Does that milestone feel important to you and what do you think has changed since then?

C: She's grown up! Yeah I know that definitely feels like a milestone because I feel like Garden Spider was kind of our shift into Boyish we were called The Blue before this and I think while we were The Blue we were like really lost on what our sound was uh we were just fooling around with anything like we were kind of country for a while god knows we did everything like

I: Yeah we really tried everything.

C: So when we became Boyish it was suddenly like “okay we narrowed down kind of what we want to produce and sound like” and I think Garden Spider was the first introduction into that so the fact that that's one years old that's kind of crazy.

I: And it's very interesting to see how much our songwriting has changed from the time we did Garden Spider and like, what we've written in the year since it's come out like listening to it a year later with our new releases coming out is so interesting just because it is really different. I mean there are some things that are the same but you could just hear like a progression.

C: right, sure.

I: and I think Garden Spider was like such a nice stepping stool for us to like kind of figure out what we actually wanted to do and write about and sound like so it's really it's really cute to see her a year later it's-

C: It’s funny I feel like I haven't really listened to it in a long time, so going back and revisiting it has been really funny too it's like “oh that's that song!”

M: Yeah definitely I mean that sounds lovely and I think it's so interesting that you bring up that point of you know well changing into boyish and finding that sound uh because in my research I did see that you had like won alt-country awards, that's so different to what I'm hearing from you!

C: Times were weird, you know?

I: It started out as a full country band like I don't and we were in Boston it's not like we were anywhere.

C: not like Nashville or anything but I was like I was playing in a country band around that time back in Minnesota so I spent like a whole country or a whole country well a whole summer of playing country gigs and it started to like really kind of relate into me in a weird way, and it started to kidna sink into me in a weird way, and we started coming up so we were like okay

I: [imitates country riff]

C: Because I think uh like country shows are some of the funnest performances I've ever done they're just super high energy and people are really routing into it and I think I just wanted to like recreate that aspect of it, but I don't think we really wanted to be a country band.

I: At the core we were like this this is like-

C: This is weird!

I: It was really fun though!

C: It was fun.

M: Fair, I love that. Yeah I'm thinking like you know alt bands with like country energy at shows now just like how you have pop musicians who have like punk energy at shows.

C: Absolutely!

M: Amazing and then one of the I believe iconic titles from Garden Spider is Mom I think I'm Gay and does this song speak to your own coming out experiences or was it just kind of something fun you put together?

C: Yeah no it definitely does. I think it kind of resonates with that feeling of like, your mom knows you're gay a lot of times way before you do this this is kind of the irony for me as well because growing up I was like very obviously gay from-

I: From birth!

C: From like coming out of the womb, like whoa look at that and so it's it's kind of that feeling where you're like “oh my god mom like I think I'm gay” like and they're like “yeah was anyone confused about this?” like I don't think anyone had doubt in their minds that you you know but yeah it's about that coming out experiences but it tries to put it in a in like a positive light because I feel like so often we tell our stories and they're really painful, and it brings up a lot of memories but I feel like this song-

I: We're nostalgic like happy memories I feel like-

C: Right. But this song I feel like we tried to spin it so it was like kind of a more gentle process and something that was more self-empowering than coming out and putting all that power in someone else's hands.

M: Yeah, definitely and I think you know you bring up an important point of like how often we only tell painful stories you know when we often listen to queer artists, if they are bringing up stuff around coming out you know with stuff around lack of acceptance, around like violence they face, and those are super important issues to draw attention to but also you know that's where we have this narrative of other people only fixating and only really caring if there's like drama to this story, if there's something that they can like find fascinating about like the harm done to you? I think it's really great that you really took on this perspective of like wanting to change that narrative a bit and have this more you know positive influence and vibe to it

C: Yeah, absolutely.

I: Yeah, definitely

M: Yeah, well if you want to listen to these songs and more potentially go back to some of those country songs, and make sure you’re also supporting them on social media. For more releases you can head down to any of the links below, thank you so much for joining me today and Boyish will be playing us out. Bye folks see you next week!

*Superstar by Boyish begins playing*