Tracing the Origins of Golden Apples’ Bananasugarfire

Philadelphia rock outfit Golden Apples’ newest LP, Bananasugarfire, is a sweeping, delicious convergence of shoegaze hues and jangle-pop sensibilities. The songs reach for tempos akin to tracks by Hovvdy, while the band—Russell Edling, Melissa Brain, Matthew Scheuermann and Mimi Gallagher—delivers instrumental affectations reminiscent of the most rewarding Clinton-era, charting alt-rock. A track like “Park (Rye)” is bold and deeply catchy; “Waiting For a Cloud” evokes wondrous, left-of-the-dial pop rock. Bananasugarfire is a sun-soaked mirage of gold-plated guitars and explosive percussion behind Edling’s bright, relentlessly dreamy vocals.

Imagine Yo La Tengo making a Replacements record at Miami Beach and you’ll get Bananasugarfire. It’s relentlessly inspiring and lyrically confounding, as the band turns warm language into mesmerizing verses. Across 10 songs, the band take contemplative, passionate songwriting about the turbulence of desire, romance and adulthood and spin it into full-bodied brilliance. Golden Apples have been socking under-the-radar dingers since 2017, but Bananasugarfire suggest it’s high time they break all the way out. If this record is any indication, we’re right on the money. We’re positively stoked that Golden Apples sat down with Paste and traced the origins and inspirations of Bananasugarfire for us. Tune in and get the backstory on your new favorite record.

“Anti-Ant Car”

To me, this song is a little picture of a moment in time that I’d like to hang onto forever. Sometimes if I am back at the house where I grew up, I find myself standing in a location in the yard and trying to collect every tiny observation I can, so that I can draw it in and never let go, or maybe so that I can conjure it up again in the future. Revisiting these significant places can be surreal; sometimes I imagine I can see all the prior instances of myself walking around all at the same time, like a lifetime palimpsest. The lyric “the Spotlight Kid is me tonight” is a reference to A) one of my dad’s favorite Beefheard records, one that he introduced to me before I was able to appreciate it, and B) this feeling I have been having as I age that, without the protection of my parents and family, I am exposed, vulnerable, and seen by some cosmic energy. Maybe a “you’re next” sort of feeling, not sure. Still working on that I suppose. The title came from a car that my godfather got for me as a kid, and again, in this vein of nostalgia and homeplace, has always been a character in my life.

“Guard Stick”

I wrote this song really quicky while in the process of writing another song. I was maybe working on “Waiting for a cloud” but started playing the rhythm progression for this song. Sometimes a song will pop up just from a sound or tone. I think I was running my guitar right into this old mixing board that I use for everything and cranking it up so the sound got all fuzzed out. It reminded me of GBV and the lines “I want to make you my brother / I want to make you my friend” immediately popped into my mind. I think the song is sort of an appeal for community. I was also playing Final Fantasy VII a lot when I was working on these songs, and “Guard Stick” was the primitive weapon used by a character who sacrificed herself so that the others could go on and complete their mission. The demonstration of kinship and love was so palpable. After I wrote and recorded the demo of this song I walked to go see our bassist’s band, Lowercase Roses, play a show and I was listening to the demo on the way, taking notes, and it felt nice to think that I was going to support one of my dear friends, hopefully making good on the sentiment of the song.

“Little Bronco”

Technically another FFVII reference in the title, but I don’t think it is that interesting of a reference to describe in detail. Anyway, I was just playing guitar and the main riff came to me. I had been thinking about how I don’t do a lot of bends in my guitar parts. But they are cool, they make the sound feel like a wave or like a big animal rearing it’s head up or something. I liked the feeling behind slowly bending a note while there were open strings ringing out, and the whole thing is distorted. It reminded me vaguely of the riff from Sun Kil Moon’s “Salvador Sanchez”. The lyrics of the song meander through moments of regret and failure, arriving at the thought that kindness is key. But I also sabotaged that line by marrying it with the rented VHS tape slogan, “Be Kind, Rewind”. I realized in a moment of sullen self-pity that if you took the movie of my entire life and played it backwards, you’d see every failed relationship in my life go backwards– so friends, family, lovers, would all come back to me. Their parting frowns would untangle to the smile that had existed before I’d failed them.

“Waiting For A Cloud”

Sort of a reminder for myself that everything comes and goes. Sadness, joy, pain, health, all of these things are dynamic, moving targets. I think when I was younger I would look for these definitive solutions to problems. I had thoughts like “well I am going to make sure I never feel that way again,” or “I am gonna make it be this nice forever!” Then, bewildered, I experienced constant confusion as none of my plans worked out. I have since tried to focus on the good things, and remind myself that this too shall pass, whatever it is. My partner (and band member), Mimi has been a consistent beacon of hope, somewhere generally safe to rest my mind in times of trouble. So the choruses kind of re-anchor us there, while the verses describe the chaos of most other waking moments. I don’t write lyrics first, I always write music first. I am curious to mix that up, but I feel like the music is the basis for the emotional content of whatever I am going to end up saying. I don’t really feel like any of my lyrics or songs are intended to be narrative, or portraits or anything like that of people or whatever.

Music, for me, has mostly been impressionistic and intuitive. Writing a song is sort of similar to the feeling of touring a house. You are exploring and looking and making connections and trying to wrap your head around what you are looking at pretty quickly. I also find that if I spend too long on a song, it generally sucks. I try to have the bulk of the lifting done within an hour, really, or else it is going to sound fussy. I know Waiting For A Cloud came together very quickly, but I did a series of demos of it over the course of a few weeks to nail down the vocal melodies, and the little riffs and whatnot generally come later, when I am actually recording. My favorite part is when Mimi sings the “Waiting for a cloud” part at the end. Her voice is like an ice sculpture.

“Sugarfire”

This one was an exception to the rule in a lot of ways. I had initially had a song that was extremely different. I had written this other song, called “Silver” (Silver Apples? Probably?), and it relied heavily on drum loops and repetition, definitely a motorik thing going on. Anyway I wanted to re-record that but with Melissa’s acoustic drums. So I asked her to play a motorik beat and I would record it, loop it, and build out the rest of the song to match the parts in my “Silver” demo. But once I started doing that I realized it just wasn’t feeling like anything. So I started just playing around with this Wurlitzer organ that I had bought. It is an old student model organ thing, it has one sound and no effects whatsoever. Kian Sorouri (of Goshupon, formerly of Golden Apples) has one and actually clued me into one that was selling on Craigslist, and I ultimately bought it. After playing around with the organ and Melissa’s motorik loop for a while, I just started coming up with the vocal parts. It was on Christmas Eve and I know Mimi and I were supposed to make a nice cozy dinner, instead we ended up workshopping this new song for hours.

Ultimately we added a bunch of other drum loops, guitar, etc, and built out the instruments that way. Lyrically, the song is about (I think) human potential. I notice that often it feels like people reduce themselves to one thing, or they define themselves really rigidly. Instead of letting ourselves be these incredible, adaptive, dynamic beings, we sum ourselves up in a one-line social media bio, or worse, we think of ourselves as a “good” or a “bad” person. A few of the lyrics hint at that, and I think Mimi’s spoken word piece is a brilliant call to action. To me it says “yes, life is suffering, but there will be incredible times too, so don’t give up!” I feel like I have said this a million times, but I think that today it is more daring to say something positive and encouraging than something negative and cynical. To me this is the crux of this album. We are expressing hope, optimism, joy, in a time where there is so much evidence to the contrary everywhere you look. I know it sounds naive, I know it sounds ignorant or even nearly irresponsible, but I also think that to be positive and joyful right now is actually the antidote to all of this horror, and I think it is punk to be positive in 2023.

“Krill”

I am not a very good guitar player. I tried, on this record, to expand the way I play guitar a little bit. I don’t even know if this comes across at all, but with “Krill” I was trying to play with a different strumming pattern / groove than usual. I tend to be very rigid, downstrokes, etc. So anyway I tried playing with more of what I think of as a ’90’s groove for it. I love the Mellotron piano voice that I have on this one plug-in, it is another example of when the sound of something inspires you to write just because the sound is interesting.

“Materia”

I was going through a No Age phase right around when I wrote this one. I love how they do this pretty/ugly thing. Like a whole barrage of ugly guitar shifts and becomes beautiful. I hear a lot of grey and then purple/reds when I listen to them. So anyway I think I wanted to try to capture that sort of thing with the rhythm guitar in this song. I wanted to see if I could plop a nice, catchy chorus in the middle of all that mess. And then the end of the song I think started almost as an entirely different song or exploration that I joined into it. I still shake my head a little at that ending riff because it reminds me of something I would have gone over in a guitar lesson or something. Repetition like that is almost like a joke. It is satisying at first, and then you’re like “okay I am ready for this to stop,” but then if you keep going just long enough it arrives at that resolve moment, where it could go on forever. The first time I ever experienced this was on a song that would play in the opening menu of this online game that I played when I was like 10 years old. It was instrumental, had no real changes, and would just loop if you never hit any buttons. I would just sit there with my head on the desk and listen to it for like 30 minutes at a time.

“Park (Rye)”

“Park (Rye)” was one that I actually intended to be on our last record, Golden Apples, but I wasn’t happy with how it came out and decided to start again. I experienced a phenomenon with nearly every one of the songs on this record where I would start working on it, I would realize it was a horrible song and I should disband the group and never play music again, and in this spirit of sabotage I would strip out lots of elements of the mix and try to find SOMETHING I liked. Once I found something in there that was compelling or interesting in any way, I would center my efforts on that part, that sound, whatever, and reform the song around that. I kept trying to come back to the intro riff in this song, that is essentially buried now anyway, but it was a sort of cascading guitar riff that, to me, evoked nature and trees and leaves, the smell of caraway seeds. Eventually I refocused on the verses, and played around with adding some additional drum loops. I had to rewrite the vocal melodies about four times. I have never worked on a song as much as I did with Park. I also started trying to play with some new chords, I think I mentioned I am a crummy guitar player. I discovered the Em7 to A7 progression, which one can hear on both Park and Stuck. I am trying, no one can take that away from me.

“Stuck”

This song started out as an homage to In Utero, but I am not sure how or why, but I know it is true in my heart. The first demos of it are just vocals and a very chorus-heavy electric guitar. I like it when there are no guitars in the verses. I think that’s something I learned from listening to the Pixies. You can make the other parts pop out a bunch more that way. Yes there is a song that goes “Stuck in the middle with you” and I made the lyrics to my song that, thinking, “I will definitely rewrite these lyrics because this is literally another song,” and then I am not sure if I got around to doing that. If you use the same words as another artist but are saying something entirely different, do they still send you to jail? My favorite part is Mimi’s guitar riff at the end of the song. She wrote that after listening through a few times, and we recorded it before she got it totally refined, so it still feels loose and gestural.

“Green”

This one was the only one on the record that is 90% live. Kian Sorouri (of Goshupon) played on this one, he was still playing with us at the time. We recorded the drums, synth, guitars, bass, all live, and then I redubbed the vocals (because of course I didn’t have lyrics written when we recorded the live stuff). I love how this came out, it was maybe the third take or so, not sure. I know everyone was still learning it. When we made the self-titled record, the people who played on that record never had a lot of time to learn the songs, so you would get these interesting moments where instinct would shine through. I think there is a lot of that on this song, and I love how it came out. Kian’s guitar tone is something I would never arrive at, and it works so well. I swear it SOUNDS green. The song is about the power of Sephiroth (from FFVII) and his evil, which was also within the main character of the game. Being possessed by evil, watching yourself destroy the things you love. Being in awe of how horrible you’ve become. But all of this, like everything else, is just a passing cloud.

You can purchase your own copy of Bananasugarfire here.