Briston Maroney Talks Finding Comfort in Weirdness, the Accessibility of Simplicity and Ultrapure

Briston Maroney wants his music to be, as he tells me, a “celebration of existence.” Above all else, he prioritizes the accessibility of emotion, his ability to join in life’s revelry and dissolution both. The Knoxville musician has been celebrating a lot lately He released his sophomore album Ultrapure on September 22 and went on a record store tour, signing albums and playing small shows in shops across the country. Right after that, he headlined three days of the Paradise Festival in Nashville, a show he puts together annually, this year featuring Skullcrusher, Samia and Hovvdy. Today, he put out a video for “Sunburn Fades.” All the while, he manages to distinguish himself from the throes of indie-folk musicians by way of sheer and steadfast integrity, and a commitment to emotional honesty.

And Ultrapure does exactly that. The record is an exercise in purity, in stripping the elements of music down to their most essential parts. Maroney comes to us, a genderless, bodiless voice—a noiseless noise which tucks its subtle volumes into the wedges of our souls. He is a gentle singer, his higher registers ascend but never too far out of reach. His lower vocalizations have a soft gravel to them, a smooth gravitas to their understated charm.

Yes, Maroney is charming, yet never at the expense of authenticity. His tender vulnerability offers a type of magnetism that is impossible to feign. On Ultrapure’s “Intro” track, he opens the album with a magnanimous mysticism:“I was born to forgive you / Ultrapure like a child / I would walk through this fire / Full of doubt with a general smile,” he sings, barely a whisper over the gentle strum of an acoustic guitar before the album picks back up with a poppier riff, sharper and more pitched up vocals on the next track. Because for Maroney, it all comes down to love and life—in all its dynamism and chaos. On lead single, “Body,” he sings: “The only plan I’ve made is to love like I may never get to love someone again.”

We caught up with Briston Maroney this week about his most recent album Ultrapure, some of his influences new and old and the joy he finds in his creative process.

Paste Magazine: Following your debut album Sunflower, do you see Ultrapure as a more mature project—sonically or thematically? And what does that look like for you kind of moving into this project?

Briston Maroney: Yeah, I think maturity definitely played a huge role in it. The relationship with music that I had, making Sunflower was just totally different. Now I think I’ve been able to take some time and catch my breath and re-analyze why I make music and what I love about making records. So, [Ultrapure] was so much less concerned about critical voices, in any capacity. It was just so much more about: Why doesn’t everything that I make count for something that I like, love? It’s the first first thing I’ve made in a while that was fully devoid of other people’s critical minds during the creative process.

You said it brought you closer to what you do love about making records. Could you say, in a few words, what is it that you love? Where do you find that joy?

Yeah, I think it’s pretty simple. I think it’s just the expression. I’ve struggled to identify feelings with words, a lot of times, like most people who use music as an outlet do. Just being able to record a sound that captures an emotion or an experience that you’ve had, that you couldn’t otherwise have, expressing that was a pretty magic thing. And I just want to keep it feeling magical, you know?

Do you think, maybe, there’s one or two songs on the album that really successfully tapped into some kind of emotional intimacy?

There’s a track called “Sink;Swim” that was written at the studio and recorded [in] about an hour. I think that one was just a true, vulnerable state of where my head was during the recording process. And there’s another song called “Delaware” that was also just so straight up, so simply recorded. It just really captured I wrote a song about feelings I was having, I’m gonna record that and I’m gonna share that with people. It was just a very simple, streamlined kind of process.

That kind of simplicity, sonically and musically, that carries what you’re doing, do you think that there’s a way that simplicity allows you to access some kind of more pure, honest, conversational thing?

Oh, yeah. 100%, I mean giving yourself a limitation to be like I’m gonna make myself figure out how to express this feeling in a way that I would feel comfortable presenting to any person without context is a challenge that I love. A great song, in my mind, is one that anybody in the world could comprehend and relate to in some way. So, simplicity—a lot of times—feels like the ticket to accessibility.

I’ve been really inspired lately by the way that young people in different genres and different scenes are able contend with older, classic, canonical influences of folk and rock music and also bring a new, youthful and fresh, energetic spin to it. And I think that’s something you’ve done successfully, could you talk a bit about your influences, both where your roots are and people now who are inspiring you?

Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree with what you just said, too, dude. I feel like there’s definitely a real resurgence of people paying respect to a lot of classic bands. I go in and out of my relationship with older music. Sometimes, it’s really important to me. Other times, I realize I am idealizing shit. I mean, I think the biggest influences for this record were some of the earlier bands that I got into when I was younger, like Nick Drake and the Elliott Smith world, but I was also in a huge Kimya Dawson phase. It’s obviously a sonically different vibe, but their fortitude as a person and just their confidence and their brutal honesty, is what I love about them. And they’re just fucking weird, which made me feel comfortable to be weird.

I think absolutely weirdness is a quite underrated quality.

Totally.

I mean, you mentioned the sort of Nick Drake/Elliott Smith Cinematic-Universe. Is that something that you grew up with? Or was it something that you sought out on your own and discovered?

Well, my grandpa got me into John Prine really young, so I had some exposure to the singer/songwriter, folksy stuff. But I think, once I found out there was such a deep rabbit hole of that world, I started digging in. I was so drawn to the outcasted people in that community. I think Prine was the coolest because he just got along with everybody—he’s an outsiders’ hero, but was also really revered by the big-shot cowboys. I was always like: This guy is awesome. But, yeah, diving down that rabbit hole, just finding so much obscure, random shit was where I would spend so much of my childhood. There was a record store in Knoxville, where I’m from. It’s called The Cave. There’s thousands and thousands of used CDs there.

It’s important to be going back into the archives, but there’s also this element of what it means to be creating now and making new things on the internet and how that changes the ways that music is consumed and produced now. How have you reckoned with and contended with those two things together?

I think, for me personally, I’ve always just felt like I had to bite the bullet of the time that we are occupying. I feel like it’s really hard to not accept the fact that, like, you’re gonna have to dive into streaming, the endless digital ocean of that shit. I have immense respect for the people who are like, I don’t want to play that game. All the time, I wish that I was a person not so easily affected by that stuff. But in tandem with accepting it, I’ve tried to do fun personal things. We just did a whole record store tour where we went to 20 record stores and played shows and signed records and got to meet everybody who came to the shows. We do this festival, to keep a real physical event on the forefront of people’s minds in relation to this record—just to keep community a human thing as well as a digital thing, because they both can exist together.

It’s about consistency, I guess. You just have to be down with your music being exposed to a lot of people who don’t give a shit about your music. People will be very vocal about not liking you until you find the people that do. It’s brutal on people. I wish that there was more kindness woven into that whole process.

When a song like “Freaking Out on the Interstate” reaches millions of millions of people, there’s gotta be an outpouring of love for it as well that comes along with it. Did you experience that?

I was so opposed to Tik Tok, because the videos were being shown to people who rightfully didn’t give a shit to hear the song. So much chance just lands in a stream of people who are interested in it and are having these experiences with it. And, before you know it, they’re sharing it with people who start developing these experiences. As much as this felt like an overnight thing, it was really cool to see—just to know that my screaming into the void was sent back in a positive way. Still, to this day, I’ll never be a person who has disdain for a song that has reached a lot of people. That is the goal for me, to have the songs reach a bunch of people who are having positive associations with it. That’s kind of the fucking dream. So, yeah, seeing that happen through the internet was really life giving. And it’s still a thing that brings me a lot of joy. It’s really motivating to keep doing the thing. Yeah.

It goes back to what you were saying before about the goal being to have something that’s so simple and universal that anyone can connect to it. That’s just like a prime example of that in action. Can you talk about your songwriting process?

Honestly, I’ve written, like, two songs since the album [came out]—which is the first time in my life I haven’t had 30 songs ready to go in a back catalogue. So, I think my process has changed a lot. I kind of am tired of doing the Okay, I have a day off, it’s nine o’clock, I’m gonna drink a coffee and write a song thing. Anyone who can do that—I literally worship them and bow down to them—but I’m at a stage in my life where I’m like, I can’t write a song unless I am fucking moved by the Spirit, A24 style, the cringy I gotta go home right now and get my guitar sort of feeling. So, right now, for me, it’s like a lightning bolt. Songs typically come in one form to me, I can sit down and write them in one sitting. And I’m really leaning into that more. I play guitar every day and I write poems in my journal all the time, which is, I think, chipping away at that process. But, right now, any songs I’m completing are ones that I sit down and see the entire thing in my head.

Would you say that’s different from how you approached the process for Ultrapure?

I think the album was my first experience doing that, but I was still in the grindset a little bit— sitting and working on an idea for hours, getting nowhere and starting at the same spot the next day. Now, I just want something to feel fucking amazing from the start.

Is there anything new, old or somewhere in between that you’ve been listening to lately that has moved you in some way?

I really liked the new Another Michael album, and the new Palehound. Oh, then there’s this band from the ‘90s called Number Girl. It’s like Japanese-influenced Sonic Youth. They’re just so fucking fun to listen to. And just really cool people.