Best of What's Next: So Cow

In 2006, Brian Kelly was teaching English to elementary-school kids in South Korea. In his free time, the Tuam, Ireland native started recording scratchy little pop gems under the pseudonym So Cow, releasing his music independently over the next couple of years, selling records through MySpace. Now he’s signed to Chicago’s Tic Tac Totally label, which released a best-of collection of So Cow’s self-released material last year and just put out his latest LP, Meaningless Friendly. Kelly is currently touring the States (he’ll appear at SXSW in Austin, Tex. this week) with plans for a European jaunt and some more U.S. dates this summer. In between live shows, he plans to continue his ongoing cover songs project, release a 7" or two and work on his next LP. Paste recently talked with Kelly over the phone while he was in San Francisco about the usefulness of a drum machine, his plans to record in dead languages and how his favorite cover song is a tribute to his drunken brother.

Paste: How has the tour been going so far?
Brian Kelly: The tour has been going really well. The audiences have been sizable and the shows have been good as regards to playing. We’ve been selling records and shirts pretty consistently. It’s pretty much everything that you’d want to go well on a tour. Although I don’t think I’ve been this broke in about five years.

Paste: Are you missing out on a day job back in Ireland?
Kelly: No, see, that’s the thing—if I wasn’t doing this, I wouldn’t be doing anything. So I guess this counts as something. Yeah, I’m pretty much throwing my life into this for a while. It keeps me busy.

Paste: When did you record some of the songs that were on the first LP?
Kelly: Well, “Casablanca” and “Moon Guen Young” got recorded in early 2007, maybe 2006. They would’ve gotten recorded in Korea. I was recording in a rehearsal space and it was very basic equipment, like 4-tracks and stuff like that. And then certain other songs, like “Shackleton,” were recorded about a year later, like 2007, in my office where I was working. I was teaching at a college, and at the hours of six, seven o’clock, all the other professors went home. So that’s what I did for about two months, recording at the office. And Meaningless Friendly was recorded in a living room, so none of them were studio recordings. I think they were all recorded in places where you wouldn’t be advised to record, but I think my knowledge of how to operate buttons and machines has improved. So I guess that’s the evolution. I’ve learned a bit.

Paste: On “Shut Eye” and “Girl Racer,” the drum machine sounds a lot more prominent than it has on previous records. Why did you veer in that direction?
Kelly: Usually, it’s from needing an insistent beat and not being fit enough to play it on the drums. “Shut Eye” is whatever BPM it is. I’ll sit down at the drum kit and I’ll have this song recorded—“Shut Eye” or “Girl Racer” or whatever—I’ll play it and it’ll be half the speed and way less consistent or intense, and I’ll get tired after about a minute-and-a-half. Songs like “One Hundred Helens,” that’s like 48 seconds. By rights, that should be about three minutes long, but I’m getting older and I’m not particularly fit. So really, there are certain songs where it’s like, “OK, I want this to just drive for about three minutes,” and a drum machine can do that where I physically can’t.

Paste: You have a few covers that you’ve done, including a version you did of “Runaway” by Del Shannon. Are you a fan of his?
Kelly: I actually don’t know much about him. My brother and his wife, they live in London, and for whatever reason, they were taking the piss out of me for being a musician and doing So Cow. And my brother started claiming that if he and his wife formed a band, they could actually do much better than me. And for some reason, this led to them both singing “Runaway,” and not doing a wonderful job, either. I think we’d all had a couple of drinks by this point. For some reason, the tune just stuck in my head. It’s my brother’s wife’s favorite song, so it was more in tribute to my brother and his wife. That’s how I’ll get to know songs, pretty much. There’ll be some odd moments. “Runaway” came about from a shit-talk conversation with family. But we’re playing the song live and that’s personally my favorite to play. It’s just so much fun to do.

Paste: A couple years ago, Deerhoof released a free compilation of B-sides on their website and included your cover of “The Perfect Me.” How did that happen?
Kelly: I did a version of it and I put it up somewhere. I think it was a Deerhoof site or something and there was a thread like, “Deerhoof covers—do yours!” So for whatever reason, I saw that and I was working at the college at the time, so I went down to the student gymnasium and just recorded it in an hour. I posted it up and said, “Here you go. That’s mine.” And I got an e-mail from Greg Saunier two weeks after saying he really, really enjoyed the cover and could they put it on a compilation they were putting out. That freaked the hell out of me.

Paste: What were you listening to when you were writing and recording Meaningless Friendly?
Kelly: Pretty much The Chills, The Go-Betweens, a lot of Billy Childish, specifically Pop Rivets, and a hell of a lot of Robyn Hitchcock. I’m just obsessed right now and have been for about six months with Robyn Hitchcock. They were the main influences. I also like Lovvers a lot. So yeah, that’s what may potentially have informed all of this.

Paste: What were you doing in Korea when you started So Cow?
Kelly: I was teaching English as a foreign language for four years. The first year, I was teaching in an elementary school. That’s where the name came from. The second, third, and fourth years I was teaching at a university. So when I was teaching at the university, I had a lot of free time, which I dedicated about 90 percent of to dicking around with music.

Paste: Some of your lyrics are in Korean. Are you fluent at all?
Kelly: No, no, not at all. Some of the songs are made up from phrases I took from a travel phrase book. Any attempts I make to write in Korean are just grammatically laughable. I think Korean people who are into the music just appreciate the effort. They’re a very polite people. If they think it’s dog shit, they’re certainly not telling me.

Paste: Do you think you’ll continue to write in Korean?
Kelly: I don’t know. I think I’m more interested in writing in Irish on the next album. I’d like for there to be one song on each album from now on that’s done in something other than English. I’d be very interested in putting something together in Irish, or Gaelic, as it’s known over here. Yeah, and more and more going in for increasingly inaccessible languages. Actually, I think there was a language that died out about three weeks ago. It was somewhere in the Pacific Islands and there was only one woman left who could speak it and she passed away. If I can try to get some recordings of her speaking and rearrange them and make them into a song about wearing scarves or something.

Paste: Maybe you can adapt the recordings and do some duets with her.
Kelly: I could certainly do that. I don’t know if there are any recordings of her singing.

Paste: Maybe you could Auto-Tune her.
Kelly: Yeah, yeah. [Laughs] Maybe I could Auto-Tune this woman’s last… I guess not her last words, but the last words of her people. And then I could sing some of the indie-pop theology beneath.