Interview: Sam Ray
By Zack Baker, Editorial Director
The advent of simple home recording and hosting sites such as Bandcamp gave a generation of kids with a Macbook and an acoustic guitar a way to share their songs with the world. The rise of bedroom recording was never about producing perfectly mixed and mastered albums, but rather an outlet for those with a notebook full of lyrics and a few chord progressions.
One of the most prolific artists to come out of that scene is Sam Ray, the Maryland native who is behind the beautifully ambient Ricky Eat Acid, fuzzy pop outfit Julia Brown and basement pop-punks Teen Suicide. ACRN recently talked at length with Ray during a brief break in practicing for his latest run of Ricky Eat Acid Shows about how he balances his abundance of projects, the things that shaped him into the songwriter he is today and where he sees "bedroom pop" going in the near future.
You’re incredibly prolific, with a ton of different projects that cover a ton of different styles. Where do you think that innate passion for music came from?
Let me think… I started playing music with piano originally, but I never had any lesson or anything. I learned it from a weird kids’ book when I was maybe five or six-years-old. We had a piano growing up, so I would play but I would have no idea what I was doing really [laughs]. When I was 12 going on 13 I wanted to learn guitar, because I think everyone really wanted to learn guitar then. I wanted to play it at a talent show really badly, but I can’t remember what song. I think it was, like, a dumb Sum 41 song that had a guitar solo in it. I was like, “Damn I really have to learn guitar so I can play that guitar solo.” So I got a guitar, and at the talent show my friends ended up doing a medley of I think Chocolate Factory by R. Kelly or whatever R. Kelly album had just came out. They all did a song and dance routine that I ended up dancing in, which meant I didn’t end up playing guitar, but I got one and started learning.
In 8th grade me and my friend were in a band, and it was kind of just a joke, but it was really fun. We were kind of writing songs, but not really, you know what I mean? We weren’t writing seriously.
You were in a band because it was more fun than sitting on your couch at home.
[Laughs] Yeah, exactly. After that, around freshman year of high school, I started making electronic music too. But that was a separate thing, and it was a joke at first too. I was just trying to have fun and learn how to do it. I think by the time I was 16 I was writing--I couldn’t really sing, I couldn’t really do a lot, but I started writing songs more seriously. I had been writing for a long time, just like short stories or poems. It had kind of always been a thing I did, even when I was in third grade I attempted to write a novel really poorly as a child. That side of it, the lyrical aspect of songwriting, appealed to me before actual music.
I didn’t really know what kind of music I liked, but when I had that band in 8th grade all we listened to was old punk and metal and rap music, current and past. Songwriting was kind of like a weird mix of things. Even then I was trying to write lyrics and play like I wasn’t taking it seriously but really being like, “I wanna get good at this.” By the time I was a freshman in college I started taking things a little more seriously. I wasn’t, like, good at anything but I was writing songs more seriously. I think that’s when I sort of started figuring out a little bit about how I wanted things to sound.
I still don’t really know--everything is constantly getting figured out always. But I think being 18 and writing in my friends houses, we’d all be just working on whatever, but everyone else was always really good at stuff. I think that’s what pulled me to it, or inspired me or whatever. Not like a competition, but just a lot of inspiration from friends who were my age, or a year older, or a year younger who were really, really good at songwriting, arranging, singing, lyricism, everything. I don’t get why but it just clicked so early for them. I still listen to one of my friend’s bands from back then--everything he did back then--because it’s better than a lot of the stuff I hear now, and I’m 23.
He was just a genius and I feel like most people I know now have someone like that, someone who inspired them early on and they go back to it. I think that’s what pushed me toward it. I would just go to his house and record stuff, I’d play him my songs and he’d play me his and he would have me play guitar or keyboard or sing on something of his and teach me how he was recording. It was always under the guise of, “Come over and I’ll give you a bunch of drugs,” or something because he had a weird life, but I’d do it just because I wanted to learn what he was doing musically.
Since then, I don’t really know. It seems like it’s only been recently that everyone around me has started to take things more seriously which is cool.
What’s that friend who inspired you doing now? Is he still making music?
He’s kind of a mystery. A lot of people didn’t even know where he was for a long time. As far as I know he still does, but no one’s really heard any of it. My friend lived with him for a bit and said that he had hundreds of songs on a thumbdrive that he would put in and out of an 8-track that just held all of his music since back then. He won’t let anyone have it. Even back in the day when we were kids, the only way to get music from him would be this convoluted chain. He would burn one of my friends a CD, and that would find it’s way to me and it would just kind of get passed around like that. One time a couple of years ago we got back in touch, and he had me send him a bunch of songs I have of his that he didn’t even have. He hadn’t heard them in years! Everyone else had more of his stuff than he even did.
It’s weird, because that’s how everyone got into Alex G as well. In Philly, people I knew would just have his music. He didn’t have anything online aside from maybe one album, but there was all this music of his that was floating around. He had thousands of songs. It was this weird sort of trading scene where one person would hit another up and be like, “Yo, I’ve got all this Alex G stuff, do you have any of it?” and they’d say no and go over to their house and get like a thumbdrive full. It just got passed around before someone finally convinced him to start putting it on Bandcamp. There’s a lot of weird word-of-mouth stuff that you don’t really--at least I didn’t think about as much. It’s 2014, there’s Twitter! Everyone’s on the internet sharing everything. It’s weird to find not only something that’s kind of flying under the radar, being spoken of so highly but so hard to find. And it’s not just a gimmick or something, it lives up to the hype.
It’s become rare to stumble across music anywhere but the internet now. Finding stuff like Alex G’s work is a really special moment now, and I think labels like Orchid Tapes and Birdtapes have done a great job translating that sense of wonder to what they put out.
Exactly. It’s just the way it’s being done. In regards to Warren [Hildebrand] and Brian [Vu, co-owners of Orchid Tapes] and the way they’ve handled everything, that kind of idea has played into it a lot. Not in trying to make things hard to find, but in trying to make everything they release physically, whether it’s tapes or records, feel special. You want to hold onto it, it’s not just some little disposable, cheap tape or a record that they release just for the sake of being sold.
Everything they do feels like it was meant just for you.
Exactly. There’s a lot of care that goes into it.
And I think that’s a major reason that things have been going so well for them. Switching gears, you mentioned that you started making electronic music as a freshman in high school. That seems really young, what got you into that style of music?
I’ve been learning guitar kind of slowly, I love piano but I never took piano lessons and I’m still not good at it. I’m not a technical musician really. I can play jazz guitar really well, but that’s about it. When I was learning music, instead of really learning how to play guitar solos and stuff, my music teacher and I did years of music theory and composition and classical theory, things like that. And I could play that on guitar but I wanted to do a lot more with what we were learning. I think that everything you’re taught can be put into action. That’s the best way to really internalize it and get something from it. There’s no point in just like knowing things if you don’t doing anything with it. I wanted to be writing things on piano, things on drums, things on more instruments. I couldn’t do any of it [laughs]. So I just started learning through a friend, learning programs like FL Studio and Reason and Ableton, notation programs, just whatever. It was a way for me to write stuff that was more than I could physically do on my own. It wasn’t serious at first, just playing around.
Eventually I was listening to a lot of stuff like Aphex Twin and stuff, like you do, and just started wondering how he does all that stuff. I would have no idea, no clue at all, but I would just start trying to recreate it purely by fucking around over and over. I never came close, but that was really fun.
You are incredibly prolific in a lot of different senses of the word. You’re in a ton of different projects, you’ve got three or four personal monikers… What draws you to working in that approach?
I don’t know [laughs]. I guess it’s just a couple of things. Teen Suicide was just a thing, a band we were doing for a little while before it broke up and when it did, we were like, “We can’t do the same band with a different sound and different people.” It’s really fun to start things--I think it’s a lot more fun to start things than continue with them half the time.
Julia Brown is also like, “Teen Suicide was a lot of fun when it started and it just got less interesting, so let’s try and have fun while starting over.” But aside from--I think the only reason--to be close to you, the first thing we released, we were originally writing as Teen Suicide and it was going to be the next release. But then the band broke up. So we took those songs, which sound pretty different anyway, and put them out with the new band instead.
Ricky Eat Acid was just the name I was working under for so long, I used it for any type of more electronic music. I don’t know. I think even when you’re really trying to think outside of the box it can be really limiting to have all of these expectations. Even when you’re working within a really broad sound under one name, you start thinking about, “Well if people are hearing what I’m doing then they’re expecting something specific from what I’m doing.” I think writing under a different name, a fake name, whatever, kind of frees you up.
I think most of the things I’ve done, anything I’ve released that I’ve really liked, started out as something I was writing under a fake name and when it was done I decided to attach to an established name. I think a couple of the Ricky Eat Acid albums were put out under different names originally, just because I wanted to write something for fun. I would create a fake band and everything. That’s what Teen Suicide was originally, it was just me writing songs on my own but I didn’t want to do it under my own name. I decided I’d have like a fake band, and a fake band name and it just turned into a real band.
The Starry Cat thing was originally just going to be sold at shows and we weren’t going to tell anyone what it was. It wasn’t going to have a name or anything, because originally it was going to be demos for the new Julia Brown album--which I don’t think a single song actually made it to. But when it came time, I put it online instead and it very well could have been a Julia Brown album but we just released it, it was a lot less serious, no one plays on it besides me, and I put it up as something else, that’ll be fun.
I think now, more than ever I’m trying to keep my focus much more specific which I guess ties into the whole thing we’re talking about, how it’s evolving now. Like the new Julia Brown album, we pulled songs from the whole year before it that we liked but we wrote and recorded it really quickly. We’d write a song and then record a song, that was really it. It was very spontaneous.
The new album’s pretty much finished now, it’s been being written and recorded for over a year. Songs on it go back to 2012, something on it dates back to 2007. And there’s so many versions of everything. Sometimes we choose the first one, the most spontaneous one, but overall there’s just a lot more time and effort and thought put into it. When being really prolific in the sense of writing something, recording something and moving on, we’re thinking about [the new album] as so much more of a defined album, as a project. Thinking about what we want to be saying with ourselves musically, lyrically, whatever.
We’re putting thought into a lot of the details, and that’s how the new Ricky Eat Acid album was too. Instead of just getting everything done really quickly, it was much more thought out and planned, spending a lot of time going back and forth on songs. Editing things for months, re-recording things even after they were finished, there was just so much more thought put into it as a release. I feel like that’s a really good way for it to be evolving, but at the same time it makes it feel that much more vital to be doing fun things secretly under different names.
It’s not like we’re taking ourselves a lot more seriously, we’re just taking what we do more seriously. But at the same time doing things without too much thought, not caring about recording quality and just doing it to do it becomes more vital than ever. It keeps you from getting locked into a specific sound or way of thinking about it. It keeps you free.
Putting that sort of into terms I understand, when I’m writing something there’s a huge difference in writing something quick and getting it out as opposed to working on one piece for a long time. But they always kind of stem from this initial idea, that spark. I imagine a lot of the songs in the new, more deliberate approach came from a place in that old write, record, share method. How do you handle the transition from that original spark to the fully fleshed out song?
There’s a couple things I guess. Sometimes it is exactly like that, there’s a track on the new Julia Brown album, the closing track on it is a song that I wrote and recorded--there’s a couple of songs on it that were written and recorded in one sitting, had no sort of idea going in. One of them I was driving home from work, which is like a 30-minute drive from that job I had at the time. On the way home, I thought of a song I wanted to record, and pulled off to the side of the road and wrote it all down. I got home, and four hours later I was lying on my back, it was snowing outside and it was 3 a.m. and I had a candle burning and as I was listening to it I thought, “Damn this is done. This is perfect, I’m not changing anything, it’s going into the record.” That was one of the first songs I did for it, and now with the record pretty much complete, that song hasn’t changed.
It’s still that first take?
Yeah, it’s partially a thing where--that song, it’s not a single instrument played, it’s all written and arranged around these cut up samples. A lot of it is samples of my own music and Caroline [White, of Infinity Crush and Julia Brown]’s songs and I sang over it. It’s more of a production thing, which lends itself more to that spontaneity, doing it all in one sitting. You’re just there with headphones, you’re not running around recording different instruments. The closing track is the same thing, it was done in one sitting, in the middle of the day, written and recorded and it’s a lot of guitars and bass, more traditional. Sometimes I’ll be working on something and something else will just kind of click instead and I’ll run with it.
A lot of the album--even though like I said, it took a long time to finish and we put a lot of time and thought into it--one of the big things we wanted to get out of it was capturing that kind of spontaneity and the surroundings and atmosphere you’re recording in. Making it really come through in the recording. Like songs you’re recording in a friend’s room at night and there’s a window open and there are people downstairs yelling and talking and there’s rain and there’s cars, and you don’t really hear any of it until the song stops. Suddenly, there are times where it’s just guitar and vocals and they both fade out and everything else bleeds in.
And I think that’s something we wanted to keep. The album was done in a lot of places, Philly, Maryland, Brooklyn, and includes different people all over, for vocals, cello, whatever. Like Warren sings on a couple of songs because I would just go to his house when I was in New York, and just be like “Hey, what are you doin’?” and he’d be doing nothing so we’d just record a song [laughs]. There’s that subtle ambiance that still comes through, but at the same time everything is really thought out.
The opening track is almost five minutes long, and I had written it months before I recorded it. I never knew how I wanted to record it, I tried a million different things but I would never get very far. One day I just woke up and I set up my mic, and it just clicked. I knew I just had to run with it, it was almost 10 or 15 hours of working non-stop, recording pianos and drums, whatever it took to make it work. That was one of the songs where it was planned out for a really long time, but it all kind of happened at once when it did.
The recording process--the second I set down to record a song, or say “We’re gonna work on this” it was always spontaneous. It was always this mad rush to get things done and capture that moment. And afterwards we’d step back, and be patient and really analyze it. We weren’t just recording it spontaneously and releasing it spontaneously, that’s the big difference. We’ve learned to step back, and separate ourselves from it for as long as we can. And that’s important.
You’re always working on a bunch of different projects, like this Julia Brown record is done now and you’re already working on a new Ricky Eat Acid record. That’s just who you are. But do you ever worry about the different projects bleeding into one another too much?
I think it’s kind of a goal in a sense. I don’t want it to become one thing, but I think that they’re both becoming more and more informed by the other as it goes on which is kind of really positive. Limiting yourself in either way would be kind of a poor choice on my part. To say that I shouldn’t be taking more of a pop influence [with Ricky Eat Acid] from writing pop songs [with Julia Brown], and that I shouldn’t be taking more of a sense of atmosphere and production [from Ricky]... all it does is push each project in a really weird direction, based on however I’m approaching it on any given day.
Some days I’ll be like, “I wanna record a song with a drummer and bass and guitar,” really traditional, and other days I’ll decide I want to do that same song but I want to do it with samples, everything through my computer but with vocals. Whichever one works in the end is the one that I go with. It’s a goal, but it’s not something I think about. I think by choosing not to think about it and be unconscious in it, it stops each one from gaining arbitrary limitations. I don’t want to record a song and say, “No, I’m taking too much from another project.” I don’t think about it in the moment, but I do assess it, like after something’s finished. I don’t think I’ve ever had a song where I felt it could go on either album. It’s always been really clear which one was which to me, but it might be less and less clear to someone who’s listening to it. I think that’s kind of a good thing.
I think when we did the first record, we wanted to do something less challenging, just writing songs and doing it with that kind of spontaneity and urgency. And now we’re doing it a lot more calculated, we’re thinking a lot about how we want things to sound and how to make things stand out and be more unique.
Going along with that, you’ve talked about how Julia Brown has been evolving and changing. For me, the Library seven-inch has always been sort of a strange entry into your overall catalog. I really like the studio-quality recordings on that record, but is that the direction you see Julia Brown going in or was it more of a one-off experiment?
It’s something we wanted to do, it’s something we’ve always wanted to do to see what it was like. I like studio recording when it fits, but it’s all about trying a lot of different things to see what sticks out to you and what makes sense. We did to be close to you really lo-fi and I didn’t even think about that until recently. I listened to it again, for like the first time in a year. That record is really, really funny. I like it still, but it’s very lo-fi.
After that, we didn’t really want to do that again so we decided to work with my friend Sean [Mercer] who we’ve known forever. It was a lot of fun, it was literally like what you said, just an experiment. I think Tyler [Gardosh] from Birdtapes just wanted us to do it and see how it went so we did. But that’s the thing, when you’re doing a seven-inch, there’s no stakes to it besides selling it. People don’t really review a seven-inch, it’s not normally seen as a big artistic statement, you can do whatever you feel like doing to try it out. Originally we were gonna keep doing seven-inches and just do whatever made sense. Like we wanted to do one that was a higher quality, but was all through tape still, have someone record it all through reel-to-reel and see what it sounded like. We were just testing things to see what we wanted to be doing.
The reason we didn’t keep doing seven-inches is because we kind of had that idea, and like I said, the new record is mostly through tape so we kind of got that out of our system [laughs]. It’s not “lo-fi,” there’s tape hiss and everything’s warm but it’s in stereo and was recorded well with good mics and nothing clips. But it was still done all in my house or someone else’s house for the most part. Certain instruments--drums, strings, brass--we’d get help from whoever was good at it, if someone we know works with strings we’d ask him for help to mic things but we really wanted it to be as much of a learning process recording it as it was writing it. It came together really quickly early on which was nice. It took a long time to do but as far as finding that sound, that happened early on.
I think people often see us and me specifically as proponents of a lo-fi sound, but I like your use of “bedroom recording” or “bedroom pop” in the sense that it doesn’t have to mean lo-fi [laughs]. It’s more of a personal method, and I think that’s a lot more important.
Yeah, exactly. Bedroom pop isn’t about making things sound like garbage, it’s about bringing the listener into an intimate setting and making it personal.
I think it’s really about what fits different songs and what fits an album. I think people kind of jumping in on that might be wondering, “Is he doing that in any kind of way as a gimmick?” But it’s more of a limitation at best. I think the end result usually speaks for itself if it’s done right, the way it should be. It needs to fit the song, and sometimes that approach works. It can mean a lot both to the listener and the people making the music.
I think when we were doing to be close to you a lot of it sounded right, but we never intended it to be done with a boombox, so lo-fi [laughs]. We were gonna do it with a 4-track but we didn’t have the means at the time and we did a demo with the boombox. It sounded great, and we were like, “Well fuck. We like this and we started this so now we have to make it fit.” But when we did “Library,” we never intended it to be that lo-fi. Doing it in the studio was like us playing around and seeing what it would have been like if we could have done it the way we wanted initially. Finding that balance between the two was what this album is for us, which is cool.
On a completely different note, Teen Suicide has been doing reunion shows lately. How did that come together?
My friend Tamaki [Hindle] who books at a venue, Charm City, in Baltimore and she was putting on a show with Mat [Cothran] from Coma Cinema, Crying from Brooklyn, and she asked if we wanted to play a Julia Brown set even though we weren’t booking at the time. We couldn’t, but I thought it would be fun to do something since Mat’s in town and Crying’s in town so I asked her to let me do something, like just one song even without announcing it. And then that snowballed into this idea of us doing a secret Teen Suicide set as a joke but taking the music seriously, just not making it a huge deal. We practiced twice for it with Brian [Sumner] on drums and John [Toohey] on guitar now instead of Eric [Livingston] and we were kind of blown away by how much fun it was [laughing]. It sounded really good! We’d never sounded good as a band before, we were never a band that sounded good.
So we did it and it went really well, so we did I think five more and we’re doing three more and then we’re done for a bit. We’re not writing...
As far as you’re aware.
Yeah, there’s no plans to do more, there’s no plans to not do more. We have a lot on the table already without it, so we’ll see. It’s just been like really fun and really necessary between doing this Julia Brown album that’s not really a full band as much anymore and not playing shows with Julia Brown. Ricky Eat Acid isn’t really the same kind of thing, and it was really necessary for all of us to be doing shows like that.
How do you think they went?
I think they went really well, I think they sounded good. I’ve never really been that excited about playing any of the shows we’ve played before until those. I think it clicked a lot more than ever before.
Are there plans for a Julia Brown tour after this album comes out? Or is that not really on table right now?
Have no plans right now, we’re just thinking about how to go about it. I don’t really have any plans to put the album out online or digitally yet, so everything’s kind of up in the air. For so long the only thing we had was to get this album done and now it’s getting wrapped up, so this is the first time we’ve really had to think about what’s next and what we want to do. Definitely would like to do something if we can, but we’ll see what happens.
