Getting to Know... Gayngs

Photo by Graham Tolbert, watercolor by Michael Gaughan

Gayngs began as a lark, a whimsical side project conceived by Minneapolis producer Ryan Olson and his friends Zack Coulter and Adam Hurlburt of the dance-rock band Solid Gold to revive the outmoded sounds of ’80s soft-rock—twinkling synthesizers, smooth saxophones and all. The band quickly ballooned as Olson invited comrades from neighboring music scenes to join their sessions, including Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, The Rosebuds’ Ivan Howard, and Brad Cook, Phil Cook and Joe Westerlund of Megafaun. Ultimately, over two dozen musicians contributed to Gayngs’ first album, Relayted (out now) a druggy and dreamlike but genuinely affectionate tribute to the heyday of quiet storm and Lite FM radio. Paste recently talked to Olson and Coulter about ponytails, irony and Gayng's easy-listening origins.

Paste: Where did you get the idea for this project?
Ryan Olson: It was from waking up to a radio station that plays soft-rock. Usually the music I make is much more hardcore, electronic sort of stuff, but I was listening to 10cc a bunch, mainly “I’m Not in Love,” just because that’s one of those songs you wake up to once in a while like, “This is amazing.” It makes you want stay in bed for another half hour and just think about the song. So it came from that, and also from me wanting to start a band with Zack and Adam of Solid Gold. We just started hanging out, making some music.

Paste: How did the project grow so large?
Olson: After Zack came out and we laid down the map of the song “The Gaudy Side of Town,” I instantly wanted to get Phil Cook to play on there, and then I thought, “Well, we should probably also get the best drummer in the world,” who is also in Megafaun. So we did a session with those guys when they were on tour with The Rosebuds, and Ivan came through with them. Then we all met up with Justin, which made sense because we all know each other from forever ago. Justin wanted to mix the recordings, so while he was doing that and I just kept playing with other musicians, bringing other folks in. That’s pretty much what I do when I record—I record while hanging out. I have friends come over and we just freak out on instruments. It wasn’t like there was some grand plan to create a 24-piece band—that’s just how the idea developed.

Paste: With so many musicians, what was the songwriting process like?
Zack Coulter: Each song was different. Like when we started with “Gaudy Side,” I had the basic idea and Justin added a verse or a chorus. But it always changed. Ryan would usually have a beat or a musical idea started, and I’d bring a keyboard part in and we’d just goof around, and let other people like Megafaun and Justin and Ivan pick songs they like or thought they could do something on. They’d do a random verse here, or a guitar part there. Each song was different, which was cool because we could come from a different place each time.

Paste: Was everybody on the same page with how they imagined the project?
Coulter: I don’t think so. I think a lot of people had no idea what it was going to be. It was a good distraction from everybody’s more “serious” bands. People could have fun, and maybe play slap bass, or play a keyboard part they wouldn’t get away with in their regular band. I don’t think anybody knew what it was going to turn out like, but they knew it was fun, and they enjoyed doing it.

Paste: Why did you decide to make every song on the album 69 beats per minute?
Coulter: Because I was drunk at 4 in the morning and I though 69 BPM would be hilarious. (Laughs) That’s really what it was. It just came from us putting parameters on the project, putting rules on it. Like, there was going to be a ponytail rule for a while. At one point we said when everybody plays with us, they have to wear a ponytail, or if they had short hair they’d have to wear a clip-on ponytail—we just thought it would be funny to see our friends in clip-on ponytails—but we gave up on that one. Keeping every song the same BPM made sense, though, because you can take one song and mash it with the next since there’s not a tempo change.

Paste: How faithful did the album end up being to your original vision for it?
Coulter: What we planned at first was making a record that was soft-rock—that was the term we were throwing around the most. I think once the songs began to take form, though, people instinctually weren’t trying to stick to a script as much as they were just trying to play great parts, only maybe in a mindset where slap bass is OK, or where cheesier sounds are OK. We would go through this keyboard that Ryan had called a Triton, and we used these sounds that normally wouldn’t work, like a synth flute or a bad synth trumpet, but I think the way we mixed and edited them together, we were able to take some of these quintessentially cheesy sounds and put them in a context where they actually work. I think that’s half the fun, experimenting with all these sounds people tell you not to use, and trying to change their minds by putting them in a new context.

Paste: Has the response to the album been what you expected? Critics seem divided as to whether the album is intended to be taken seriously or as a joke.
Olson: It’s interesting that people have any opinion on it. It’s not a Weird Al album. It’s not a joke. If critics want to use the album to write a dissertation on hipster irony, though, they can go to town. It’s pointless for me to tell them any more plainly than the album itself what it’s about. It is interesting to see how people get fired up about it, though. I think some people are afraid that the album is an inside joke that they’re not in on. Like, if you like it, you’re being made fun of. That’s not the intention. There are definitely some quasi-guilty pleasures on the album, but we’re referencing them for a reason.
Coulter: People can read into the album however they want. With the last song on the album, there’s definitely some humor there—we can’t deny that. But the lyrics are serious, and the songs I wrote are just as deep as the songs I write for other projects. It was fun to make, and we were definitely having a great time and joking around record it, but when it comes down to it, all the music that was being played, and all the music that was written was definitely serious—at least my stuff was, I shouldn’t speak for everybody else. If people want to take it as a humorous project, that’s fine, but I think people can take a lot away from it as serious music.