Golden Apples’ Shooting Star and the Art of Breaking Yourself Open

I don’t know. In a way, with our last record, Bananasugarfire, I felt like I had really broken into this exciting new process with my own songwriting—like, really embracing pop sensibilities and embracing joy as a concept, which is something that I haven’t really done very much of. But I didn’t want to just write another Bananasugarfire album afterwards; I wanted to take what I had learned from it and make something new, except I didn’t know what that would be. I didn’t have a mission statement. In the end, a lot of the songs were almost about the process of writing songs itself.

It is such a weird, paradoxical process: the only way to express anything is through language, through writing, but also, writing is itself the problem because there’s only so much language can do. Language is inherently limiting, and that’s so hard.

I know! Sometimes it can feel like words are almost reductive to a feeling. It reminds me of this Modest Mouse line—I forget the song, but the line is like “Language is the liquid that we’re all dissolved in.” That’s just so real. It’s like, “Yeah, language is great—for getting you out of something that it also creates by being so inherently limited!” [laughs]

It both creates the problem and provides the solution for it.

Right! I know. It’s absurd. And I also think it felt weird to be sitting there like, “Oh, here I am trying to write my little songs while the planet is being destroyed and there’s also a genocide!” There was just a lot in my mind at the time. And I kept getting sick, too—like, I just kept getting sick.

With different things or the same thing?

I don’t know, even! I had, like, a tooth that got messed up, and then I had antibiotics, and then I had all this like digestive stuff. It felt like this—I mean, I don’t believe in anything like this, so it’s silly—but on some level it did feel like this almost Biblical test: Will this record kill you or will you get to the top of this mountain?

Do you feel like you’ve gotten to the top of the mountain now?

I do. But to be completely honest with you, I feel like I also left a lot of me down there in the valley getting up here. It was an arduous journey. And sometimes when I listen to the record, I still feel the pain. It’s hard to be like “Wow, that came out so great, it’s so wonderful;” I mostly just look back and think “Oh, that was a crazy time.”

The parts of you that were left in the valley—did that feel like an expulsion of something negative that left a hollowness in its wake, or was it more of an actual full loss of something you weren’t prepared to let go of?

That’s a good question. I want to be optimistic and say that it was a cathartic release, you know? But maybe that’s also because I feel like it’s probably odd to feel almost, like, slightly traumatized by your own art. [laughs] Listening back, I see those parts of me that I left behind, and they’re not with me anymore. I was talking to someone the other day and they were describing creativity or art-making as, like, “splitting the nucleus,” and that makes sense to me. There’s this core of the whole thing, but you have to break it open in order to make something. It is a kind of violence, in a way—you have to rip yourself open for it.

I mean, that’s probably why there are so many phrases about writing that are so weirdly violent; “kill your darlings” and whatnot. I think that, often, creativity is thought of as synonymous with creation—which makes sense, etymologically—and thus opposed to destruction, but I don’t think it’s that black and white.

No, I agree with you. Especially because art is so often catalyzed by destruction, by catastrophe and suffering. There’s a lot of dark stuff that goes into making a little something pretty, and it’s something I’m still navigating and hopefully will continue to navigate. I don’t want to figure it out, you know? But also, I think that’s where collaboration comes in: once it gets to a point where I can share songs with friends—people I trust, people I love—I know that we’ll get through it together, one way or another.

At what point in the process did you start sharing that work? Was it earlier on than is typical for you?

Generally, I’ll write a song, I’ll make a demo of it, and then, theoretically, I’ll share it with the band. But sometime between Bananasugarfire and this record, I kind of realized I didn’t want to have a band? So I told everyone in the band, like “Hey, I’m going to kind of blow this up for a bit and do my own thing for a little while. And then once the record is done, we’ll figure out what makes sense.” It was kind of a weird move. But I just wanted to feel like whatever might happen could happen. Because when you have a very specific arrangement for music, you start writing to that arrangement, and I didn’t want to just write for drums, bass, guitar. I wanted to be able to be like “The song is all vocoder!” if I wanted to. I mean, obviously, I didn’t do that. But I wanted to be able to—I wanted the option.

It’s interesting to hear that it isn’t that you started out from the get-go with a more open process, but rather that you narrowed it to yourself, and only widened the collaboration after you got to that point. Really, those original stages of writing sound almost more solitary than your process has ever been prior.

It definitely was. I always keep a journal when I’m writing and the journal for the Shooting Star stuff was like, “This is bad. You need to figure this out. What are you trying to be?” It got to the point where I was just talking to myself as if there was someone else there—but it was just me, drawing a spiral forever.

It just became an exercise in self-flagellation.

Honestly? Yeah, kind of. But I do think that’s a really good observation that the process was this narrowing down and then this breaking out of that isolation.

Was the intent going in always to kind of funnel it out at the end? Like, that’s why you narrowed it at the start?

I wish it was. It wasn’t that planned out. It was more just trusting the gut—while my gut was failing me.

You’ve talked before about how Bananasugarfire marked a shift in your lyrical approach, and then how The Songs of Bananasugarfire as Reimagined By… showcased the shift in the creative process. Do you think having done both of those records already was part of why it felt difficult to figure out what direction to take Shooting Star in?

That’s interesting, because I didn’t think about it like that at the time—but totally, actually. I remember when I was working on the remix record, I loved what would happen when I’d send a friend all the stems from a song and they’d send me something back that was just mind blowing and different. I actually asked some of the folks who I had done the remixes with if they’d work on this record with me; unfortunately, timelines just didn’t work out. But yeah, you’re totally right; that was kind of where my head was going in the beginning of that process.

It was recorded in five different places, too, right? Was it important to you to take that more nomadic approach to the recording of the album?

It’s funny because, as a listener, that kind of thing freaks me out. When I’m going to listen to a record that I know has been recorded in a bunch of different places, I’m almost like, “I don’t know if this is going to feel cohesive. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to get into a zone with this record.” But I think that’s just a testament to how well Matt Schimelfenig understands my sensibility and understands the sensibility of everyone else. I think that they were able to bring the record together in a way that feels absolutely cohesive. It makes me not afraid of that anymore.

What was the sound that you were looking to realize in the studio? Did you have a sense of it going in, or did it come together on its own?

I think, most of all, I went in there hoping to explore the unknown a little bit.. I just trusted that if I got the people together that it would happen. It’s a little like a trust fall, or falling in love. You fall without knowing if it’s going to work out, but you hope it does. Luckily enough, in this case, it did. And I always love the approach of using the studio as an instrument, getting really into the sauce of sounds and trying a bunch of different stuff out. Those are the fun parts for me. Once the song as a thing exists, it’s like, “All right, yes. Let’s play dress up with the song.”

Were there any particular “a-ha!” moments that stood out to you?

I think I had a moment like that with the song “Feliz.” It’s the second song on the second side of the record, and it’s all about me falling in love with my now-wife, who is also in the band.

How long have you been together? Was it before the band?

We started dating at the end of 2018. We fell in love while we were on tour together. The song, in my mind, traces those first moments. I remember as I was working on that song, I really liked the general idea of it, but there was just something that wasn’t quite working all the way. Then I stumbled on the part in the middle of the song where it’s like “I reached out my hand in the hotel dark / and I found a shooting star,” and that big shooting star thing felt special to me for some reason. In my earlier versions, the song just went on to the next part. But then I was like, “No, let’s stay on this shooting star part for a minute and just, like, let it burst.” I think that helped recontextualize the spaciness and the bigness of that whole song. It went from being pretty rigid and structured to feeling a lot more open and flowing. It was kind of leaning into that unknown again—it felt rewarding to be like “This feels unstructured, but maybe that’s okay.”

Structure can be great, but songs sometimes don’t want to fit whatever structure you were trying to fit them in, and you have to be willing to follow the music where it’s going instead. That happens to me a lot: whenever I think a song is viable and start to execute it and build the instrumentation and the arrangement, I’m like, “No, actually, this sucks.” But then you have to just keep digging. You have to—again, going back to the violence of it—you have to rip the song apart. Find the thing that still feels special and go back to that. Go back to the one word that feels right; start over, and build around that one piece.

When do you realize what that one “piece” is in a song, typically?

I always think I know, but then I realize that I don’t. It’s always funny because my head is very simple with this stuff. Like, I love the Beatles, I love the Velvet Underground. So I try to keep it like this simple, minimal ‘60s sounding kind of stuff with maybe some loosey-gooseyness to it, but then I end up having to confront the fact that I grew up in the ‘90s, surrounded by this other pop music that always works its way in. I think I’ve been getting more comfortable leaning into that.

What was the discomfort originally?

Well, I think maybe when I was a kid, I was embarrassed by the radio. Like, “No, there’s nothing cool on the radio!” [laughs] And now I’m like “90s radio was actually so good!” I’m rediscovering all these songs that I shied away from as a kid. Everclear, for instance, is a band that I was always just like, “whatever,” about—and Oasis, I was always, like, “Meh, I don’t really care.” And I loved Beck then, but listening to Beck now, I’m like, “See?! It’s so poppy. It’s so well produced. It’s like, but that’s not punk, you know? So I had to reconcile that. Gotta give credit where credit is due, though; this is a Mimi thing. My wife is obsessed with that era of music. So I’ve had to kind of be like, “Okay, yeah, actually I was wrong about most of this stuff.”

And that changed perspective has bled into your music more and more over time?

I do think so. I think it’s fun to try to write really popular, poppy songs. My dad likes classical and jazz and stuff, so I’m always like, “He probably won’t like this song at all,” but it is fun to stay really poppy sometimes. And again, like Velvet Underground—Lou Reed was one of the best pop song writers, you know? So I don’t feel too bad about trying that.

I think the lines are also just blurrier than people often act like they are. Genres are much less cut-and-dried than algorithms would have us think.

Yeah. It’s just a way to describe things. It’s been funny—I feel like our band has gotten a lot of sort of funny descriptors over the years that, you know, I’m like, “…Sure.”

I saw someone call you shoegaze recently, which made me raise an eyebrow.

Exactly! I was talking about this with Mimi the other day; I feel like we’re like a soft rock band. We’re a rock band, but we’re not, like, AC/DC, y’know? So in that sense we’re soft rock. But we’re not soft rock. Ah, I don’t know.

Not soft rock as in the genre, but rock with the modifier of soft.

Yes. Yes! [laughs] So I don’t know. It’s confusing.

Your dog’s named Birdy, and it just so happened that while listening to the record I noticed a lot of recurring motifs—feathers, shooting stars, themes of freedom—seemed to come back to the concept of flight. Was that intentional, or did you only realize that throughline after the fact?

I think it’s more of the latter. I kind of like that about it. I’m really not a deliberate artist at all. [laughs] I’m more intuitive or spontaneous; I just trust that things will make sense. Like, I wanted to call this record something totally different. I had different artwork all ready to go. I changed it more on a gut feeling.

What was the other name?

It’s really weird; I was going to call it BIOYA, like B-I-O-Y-A, which is an acronym my dad used to always say. It means “Blow It Out Your Ass,” basically. [laughs] I loved how irreverent and, I don’t know, how “fuck you!” it was. The origin story is funny, too; my sisters were getting bullied in school at one point when they were young, and my dad—who’s their stepdad—was like, “Just tell the kids who are bullying you BIOYA.” I think maybe my dad told them what it meant, but “just say BIOYA” became this secret little thing for us.

Did they? Tell the bullies BIOYA?

They did. And, you know, no one knew what it meant, but.

The bullies definitely fucked off after that. They were scared.

They were like, “What? We don’t compute. We must disappear.” [laughs]

I just thought it was a funny kind of concept. But once I was really sitting with the record, it just didn’t feel like BIOYA anymore. Eventually I realized “Whoa, there’s so many times I say ‘shooting star’ in this record and reference these escapes or these soaring, free things.” It made sense in retrospect.

We touched on the hellscape that is the modern day briefly earlier, but I wanted to bring it back there for a second—what is it like to create art in a time like ours? Does it feel like a balm, a catharsis, a responsibility, a futile effort?

All of that. For me, as someone a little plagued with self-loathing, I’m kind of like… This is the worst point of my privilege, you know? That I’m turning to my guitar when the world is falling apart.

But then I think about—and not that I equate myself in any way with Bob Dylan!—but I think about Bob Dylan, about people who have literally changed the world with a song. And I just think, “Well, maybe this is the only thing that I can do, even if it’s stupid and it doesn’t do anything for anybody.” Of course, I try to advocate for things and send money to things when I can, but other than that, this feels like kind of the only thing I can do.

I was talking to my dad earlier today about this jazz record that I was listening to, “Volume Two” by Secular Music Group. We were just talking about how effortless and beautiful the music was, and how it’s kind of amazing that anybody can make art right now. It feels like a time that is so inhospitable to creativity and art, and yet this is a moment where art is so necessary. We were just talking about the contradictions there. And my dad said, “Well, I think art is just the assertion of humanity, in a way. It is the insistence that humanity exists.” And I guess, in that sense, the act of creation itself feels a little like an act of bravery and defiance—to be like “We’re still here. There’s still people here, thinking and feeling and making stuff. The spirit is not broken.”

More generally speaking, though, what’s your writing process like?

I think in the past I was more concerned with needing to make the songs, like, literally interesting—needing to make them feel like I have something to say. But starting with Bananasugarfire, maybe even before then, I started trying to just let it be a feeling, a cloud of thought—and if it resolves into something articulated, that’s great. If it doesn’t, if it stays wishy-washy, then that’s the thing, then, too. So yeah, these days I try to just really stay true to that initial kernel, whatever it is, and work from there. I don’t have an agenda and that’s just not the way I approach it. I’ve never started with lyrics. Believe me, I’ve tried. I love musicians and artists who work that way, but I just don’t. And, well, I’m trying to try to accept who I am. [laughs]

Love in particular is such a prominent concept throughout the lyrics of this album—in “Feliz,” for example; the one about you and your partner. How did that song come about?

As I was building the music for “Feliz,” I think it just reminded me of that time. The song started with drone-y synthesizers and this arpeggiated keyboard part that was really shimmery—it had all this movement and felt very flowing. Then I was recording, trying to figure out what acoustic guitar would do in the song if I were to write it alongside what I had, and then it just slowly started to conjure this memory of walking around LA with my partner and feeling like everything was just so cool and beautiful and interesting. It all felt like it embodied that. So it’s a lot of just following the feeling that the sounds bring up.

Obviously, not all songs on the album even have lyrics; the last song is an instrumental. What was the decision leading into that, both in terms of the song itself and also making it the last song on the album?

I worked on that song for a while. I came up with the guitar part and then the drum beat and it reminded me of this Liars song called “The Other Side of Mount Heart Attack”—I think it’s maybe the last song on Drum’s Not Dead—and I ended up just writing the song in that vein. I was trying to come up with vocal melodies for it for a long time, but—again, that whole idea of pulling away the things that don’t make sense—I eventually arrived at “Oh, this is just an interesting groove.” You know?

For a while, I wasn’t going to even include it on the record. I was like, “This is cool, but I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know if it makes sense.” And Eric Osman, who runs Lame-O Records, said, “No, man, you’ve got to put that song back in. That was maybe my favorite one.” So I put it back in the SoundCloud playlist and realized it was actually pretty cool like that, without lyrics. We just kind of stuck with it.The more I thought about it, the more it just started to make sense. It’s just this trailing idea, kind of swimming around and fading away.

The trail the shooting star leaves behind.

Right. Oh, on the actual vinyl record, we did something there that is going to probably annoy some people—the song goes into one of those loop-lock things. If you don’t ever turn it off, it will play forever. It’s really cool. I always wanted to do that with something, and this song felt right for it. The mastering engineer and I actually had to speed the song up a tiny bit so that the rotation of the record at that point would line up with the bar of the music; we needed one go-through of a bar of music to be exactly, I don’t know, like 3.27 seconds or whatever. It was just a fun process.

You do visual art as well, right? Design for Lame-O Records and that sort of thing. Do you take a more visual approach to music because of that?

I think I do. I’m a graphic designer to pay the bills, but then music is my art, I guess. Sometimes a song will feel almost like a poster design or a logo where it’s like “Here’s a concept simplified into this digestible piece.” And I try to be very intentional about making the visuals for the band make sense. I often think of songs and sounds in terms of colors, too. One of the more annoying things about writing music with me is that I’ll be like, “Oh, this part feels like green, but I feel like it needs to be like purple.” And people are just like, “You’re an idiot.” [laughs] I’m not trying to be obtuse intentionally, but it’s hard!

What color is this album to you, then?

I think it oscillates between each song. It shifts. Like, “Feliz” is very yellow, pink, red to me; “Another Grand Offering for the Swine” is rainy day brown; but I think, overall, the album is a dark rich blue like a night sky—like the album cover. Overall, it’s not super triumphant, but I think there’s a depth, a serenity, to it. There’s some acceptance in this record that maybe wasn’t there in earlier albums—then, it was more about trying to make a statement or figure something out. And with this one, as much as I was totally doing that, I do feel like I kind of arrived at a place of acceptance. Even the last song was about letting that go.

Speaking of the cover, you made it, right? What was the inspiration there?

This was actually another “a-ha!” moment; this was crazy. I told you before that I changed my mind about the artwork and BIOYA and everything, right? I was looking through my phone to see if I had any photo I could use for the album art because I was coming up against the deadline, and I found this photo that I had taken at this bar when I was on tour—the same tour that Mimi and I developed feelings for one another on. And there was this mirror at this bar in New York and it has all these horses on it, and I was like, “Oh, this is so cool. I’m going to use this for the album artwork. This is great.” I didn’t know what bar it was from; I just knew it was from this tour. So I was working with it and I redrew the horses and everything, and then one day we were watching this movie called A Different Man—I think it came out like last year—and it just so happened to be shot in that bar. I saw the mirror and I was like “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What the hell?” So I looked up “A Different Man filming locations,” and found the bar—and it’s a bar called Birdy’s. Like my dog! I was just, like, “What the hell?!”

The kismet is insane!

Yes. Exactly. It just felt like destiny. I was like, “That’s it. This is it. I’m not going to ask any more questions about that.”

Okay, I know we’re coming up on the end here, so I’ll just ask one last thing. Basically, there’s this David Berman quote from Purple Mountains that I think about a lot: “The songs build little rooms in time / and housed within the song’s design / is the ghost the host has left behind.” What do you think the room, the ghost, of this album is like? What will remain housed within the album’s design?

Hmmm. I think… It definitely has some objects of baggage within it. Like, it’s definitely a room that I feel like I cannot stay in anymore. It’s a little like a childhood bedroom, in that when you go in there, you’re brought back to so many things that are reaffirming but also kind of make you go, “Oof, glad that that time is over,” you know?

It sounds a little like… If Bananasugarfire was the breakthrough, Shooting Star is what was needed to actually close the chapter.

Yes. I think that’s a great way of putting it. I feel like there’s a body of work there that feels like it has arrived at its completion now. And I can kind of do anything going forward from here—I would love to make an album someday that has no lyrics or something, that’s just music. I feel like as I’m getting older I’m listening to more and more music like that—but, again, I love these pop songs, so who knows? Either way, I feel like this record put me in a good place, so I just feel excited about what comes next.

Casey Epstein-Gross is Assistant Music Editor at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].