From the 1880s through the turn of the century Coney Island was arguably the preeminent vacation destination in the United States. Her three amusement parks, Luna Park, Dreamland, and Steeplechase Park, drew millions of visitors a year through the 1920s, but fires and financial mishaps became a constant struggle. While Steeplechase was able to rebuild after their fire in 1907, Dreamland burned down in 1911 and was never rebuilt. These burnings started what would be a constant cycle of investment and neglect on Coney Island, with nearly every New York City administration making some aspect of a Coney Island revival as part of their plan, though Robert Moses famously had it out for the place.
Coney Island these days is fun as hell but does feel vaguely haunted. Everywhere you look you see Tilly’s Funny Face iconography to remind you of those glory days over a century ago, and the parks that exist there now feel like they’re built on the graves of what once was. That being said I grew up going to Cyclones games and the Aquarium with my family and have many fond memories of Coney Island from my youth. (I have definitely spent much too much time wondering what Party Marty is up to these days.) There is much fun to be had even if the crowds aren’t as rabid as they once were.
Bryn Nieboer spent more time there than your average New Yorker thanks to her platoon of friends and loved ones who felt at home in Coney Island’s carnival atmosphere, some who are still with us and some who unfortunately passed. With many of the people who brought her there no longer in her life, Bryn started to think of Coney Island as the physical representation of that transient state we have with friends as we get older, where if you aren’t in the same city and in a rhythm of regularly hanging, your entire relationship can become the weddings and funerals that bring you together.
Her bandmates in Stay Inside had similar feelings. It was the summer of 2022 and the group was realizing that the world they exited after COVID was very different from the one they had entered. They were having a great time partying with the people who were still in New York but we’re feeling wistful about the ones who had left the city for one reason or another. There was a bit of reservation to their joy, you can imagine the group looking around a party and wondering who might next move out to the suburbs and more or less leave their lives. The group channeled that celebration of the good times and the fear that their end is always around the corner into their excellent new record Ferried Away.
Bryn, who plays bass, and lead singer and guitarist Chris Johns were kind enough to meet me and my good friend John Murray out in Coney Island to talk through how they put this record together. John took the gorgeous photographs throughout the piece and I was particularly thankful he was there because he, like Bryn and Chris, is an engineer, and his engineering questions helped bring a lot about the band’s process to light. Chris’ focus is the composition of the tracks and writing from the heart. Bryn often then digs into the source code of what Chris wrote to get to the meaning he might not have realized was in there. Drummer Vishnu Anantha and guitarist Chris Lawless will similarly come with loops and pieces of tracks that Bryn and Chris Johns will project manage into proper songs, as Vishnu was particularly influential with the sound of the band’s 2022 Blight EP. Chris described Bryn as his musical therapist, with the songs he writes being almost like Rorschach tests for Bryn to interpret.
Stay Inside had written gutting and emotional songs before, particularly on their lauded debut Viewing. While the songs on Ferried Away were sonically peppier than their previous material, the group was worried because they were now writing about specific friends they didn’t see nearly enough who actually might hear these songs. Despite their worries, the members of Stay Inside do seem to be good to their friends, so the songs have mostly been well received by the people they’re about. Chris Johns casually mentioned that he accidentally biked I-95 to visit his friend that “A Backyard” is about after the two reconnected thanks to the song, and I get the sense he’d bike any highway if that was the only way he could see that homie. The most illuminating track on the album has to be “A Town to Give Up In” however which the group dedicated to their drummer Vishnu and his lingering desire to hit the quiet life of the suburbs. You get the sense that the group wanted to be singing this song on this album to let Vishnu know exactly how loved he is now so they aren’t singing a song about how they haven’t seen him in years on the next album.
Stay Inside was kind enough to invite us to their album release shindig, but the night before I had to pull an all nigher for a bizarre work event and I somehow overslept the party. Oversleeping your new friends’ party for their album about how important showing love to your friends every opportunity you get is??? Higgins, how did you fuck this up that bad??? Luckily for me my friend John Murray was once again there to cover my ass, sending my apology to the band and making friends on Grandma Sophia’s behalf (Shoutout to Wifey who he met there and whose music rocks!) I feel so lucky to have John in the rhythm of my life, so lucky to have Josh who connected us in the rhythm of my life even though we no longer live in the same city, so so so lucky to have the musicians and writers and photographers who I have met thanks to this stupid blog in the rhythm my life. It is always worth reaching out to someone you do not see enough to finally plan that trip to Coney or even just tell them you love them, and I hope that Ferried Away encourages you to do exactly that, but show that as much love to the friends you see all the time whenever you get the opportunity. After all, you never know when they might get Ferried Away from you for good.
John and I talked with Chris and Bryn about their relationship with Coney Island, their plan to be lifelong New Yorkers, and the friends who inspired Ferried Away. Thanks to the Freak Bar in Coney Island for hosting us for the conversation, and to the original Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs for having us after.
GSC: What are your names, how do you identify, and what do you do in the band Stay Inside?
CHRIS: I’m Chris Johns, I’m he, I play guitar and sing in Stay Inside.
BRYN: I’m Bryn Nieboer, I play bass in Stay Inside, and I’m a lady.
GSC: What are your earliest music memories? Who was playing music around the house? Where were they playing?
BRYN: My grandfather was a salsa musician. My grandparents immigrated from Mexico before I was born.
GSC: What did he play?
BRYN: Piano. He was a composer, his job was playing in Latin clubs in LA in the 50s.
GSC: That’s so cool. So music was always in the house.
BRYN: Yeah, he had a huge vinyl collection too. I would listen to a lot of jazz, the rock albums of the time, comedy albums. He also taught me piano from my diaper days. I was classically trained and went to recitals until I was middle school. When I was 11 someone gave me a guitar for my birthday, like a shitty yard sale guitar. So I played guitar in bands for a while before playing bass in this band.
CHRIS: I didn’t know about the salsa honestly. You probably told me but my mind is blown right now. I played the clarinet all growing up. That was my thing. I was very into it, I played for years, but you can’t really write music that well on a clarinet that people want to listen to, so I bought a guitar.
BRYN: He’s got some clarinet on this new record so it came full circle. Last night he was talking about how he was in the classical concert band in high school.
GSC: Look at our friend settling up shop!
BRYN: Hi Kitty!
CHRIS: Is this the bar cat?
GSC: Yea, someone said his name‘s John Wick but they might have been messing with me.
CHRIS: I watched the first John Wick for the first time last night funnily enough.
GSC: Who were some of the other people that made you love music at a young age?
CHRIS: I got all of my music tastes through my best friend growing up Mike Nachbar, who was the first person in our school to have a cable modem. He would go around the school selling bootleg CDs out of his backpack and made a lot of money doing it.
BRYN: He’s a billionaire now.
GSC: He owns Spotify. My parents wouldn’t let me buy parental advisory CDs. My uncle got me Green Day’s Dookie and the Self Titled Sublime record, and my parents took both of them away. So I was like, I guess I’ll just listen to the grimy rap music that Mike Akbar gets me for the rest of my life.
BRYN: I grew up really Christian. I started listening to a lot of skate punk at age seven or nine when I wanted to break out and listen to music that was cool for my age then. We lived in Los Angeles, and we were very poor, so I also heard a lot of rap. I was really into anything that felt a little weird. I really liked Five Iron Frenzy, MxPx, and a lot of on the edge Christian stuff, Starflyer 59. At age nine or ten my Christian punk friends and I told my parents we were going to a church thing and we hit an all-ages Rancid show, that was my first concert.
GSC: What were your earliest bands like when you first started making music yourselves?
BRYN: I’ve been in at least one band since I was 16. When I was in high school I started my first band with my sort of boyfriend at the time. Then through college I was in a math rock band and an ambient band and a drone band. I was always doing something that was trying to play shows. I toured for the first time in college with a really cool math rock band called Animal. We went on our East Coast full tour, that was the first time I played New York. That was also the first time I thought something could happen with music.
CHRIS: I was just making beats on Fruity Loops. I had Acid and Cakewalk. Those were rough DAWs.
BRYN: I was listening to one of his old records and I was like, there’s a world where you were a Das Racist or Lakutis style NYC indie rapper.
CHRIS: I do have two full rap albums that are only shared with my friends.
CHRIS: You cared more about that side project than anything else you did before.
CHRIS: It’s true. It’s to date my best work.
GSC: How did you guys come to New York and how did you all connect?
CHRIS: Me and Bryn came to New York around the same time in 2010, though we didn’t know each other.
BRYN: I went to school in North Carolina in Winston Salem at the Carolina School of Arts.
GSC: Where Danny McBride and his crew went!
BRYN: Yep! I’ve partied with that guy. I went there for film and worked in film though I do not any more. After school I could have went back to LA but I had visited NY twice and felt a gravitational pull. It felt like the place I needed to be. My friend had a job for me working at MTV so I ended up moving like the week after I graduated. I’ve been here since and I don’t plan to leave.
GSC: Chris was just saying the same thing about not leaving. How did you get here?
CHRIS: I wanted to work in music, and there aren’t that many cities where you can do that. The funny thing is I didn’t think New York was a place that people actually lived in. I just thought it was that place you see on TV, even though I was only a few hours away and frequently went to shows in the city, I don’t know. Then I got a job in the city and moved and never looked back.
BRYN: There were five years where we’d hadn’t met. I then fully changed careers, I work in engineering now. I was working at a company called MakerBot. Vishnu works there and Bartees worked there too when he was in Stay Inside. Bartees met Chris on Craigslist, and then brought me and Vishnu into the fold on bass and drums.
GSC: Shout out Craigslist. It has a weird rep, but I have such good luck on Craigslist.
CHRIS: I’ve gone on dates from Craigslist.
BRYN: Me too.
GSC: Successful?
CHRIS: No. I mean, just from selling stuff and then asking people out. I wasn’t like…
GSC: Looking for love on Craigslist.
BRYN: Did you ever date carpet girl?
CHRIS: Ah man carpet girl, I wish. I woulda moved for her. She was selling her carpet because she was moving from New York to California.
GSC: That’s your Before Sunset. What were those early days as a band like?
BRYN: This is 2016. We were high on post-hardcore, Further Seems Forever and Emery, me and Bartees especially. Me and Johns are really big fans of The Microphones, Interpol. We had all these influences and we’re like, let’s start a rock band. There was a really strong twinkle-weed-party-emo thing in Brooklyn at the time. There was Proper who wasn’t called that at the time, Nervous Dater, Good Looking Friends. We started going to their shows and being like, “Can we play with you?” And then we did, so we became good friends, even though we weren’t really that kind of band.
GSC: You guys started with the Demo EP in 2016. And As You Were in 2017.
CHRIS: Damn, the Demo!
GSC: It’s still up there on Soundcloud.
BRYN: I thought you had the burned CD.
GSC: What was that era of the band like? I read an old old interview where you talked about your first show at Fat Baby in the LES being particularly memorable.
CHRIS: What’s funny is we’re now doing the same thing that we did then. We used to meet in my apartment to write. We then found a producer and hit a studio to record, but now we’re easing back into hanging out in my apartment. We’re regularly hanging, having a good time and writing music again. That’s the reason I like being in a band. Just hanging out with Bryn and the gang and trying our best.
BRYN: After I moved here I tried to make it happen with music and kept failing. When we started this band, I think everybody wanted to do it for real. We wanted to make good songs that people would like, versus more being in a niche with a math rock or ambient band or whatever. Fat Baby, I don’t even remember how that happened.
CHRIS: We booked it through James.
BRYN: Oh yea! And then we just invited everyone we knew.
CHRIS: They tried to take like a 65% cut of the door.
BRYN: That happened to us multiple times when we were first starting out.
BRYN: How do those songs sound looking back? Is that music you ever revisit?
CHRIS: I think it’s in the same realm, we’ve just learned a lot since then.
BRYN: It’s a little embarrassing that the recording quality is really bad. It’s not about songwriting as much, we’ve just grown a lot.
CHRIS: Everyone has their own musical personality. No matter what, if you play music you have this imprint of what you sound like. You can completely change genres or instruments and you still have the same essence. You can easily see that when you look back at a creative body of work over time. If you ever go to see an exhibit at the Guggenheim, you’ll walk up the spiral staircase and you see people over the course of their 40 years playing with the same ideas in different ways as they grew and developed.
GSC: I love that comparison.
CHRIS: We’ve been talking a lot about how much these albums you make, for me, you don’t think about them as much as they happen. An album can be a time capsule of who you were and what you were doing at that time whether you realize it or not in the moment.
BRYN: The early stuff is fun to go back to and listen to, but it’s definitely not something I do very often. It’s like scrolling back in your Facebook feed. Do I want to feel that feeling right now? I’m not sure, especially because I was not in the best place when we started the band.
CHRIS: There’s probably some 40 syllable German word for that feeling.
GSC: Moving into 2018, you dropped two EPs The Sea Engulfs Us and The Light Goes Out and then your split with Good Looking Friends called Balancing Acts. Bartees also left the band and Chris Lawless joined. Is it tough being a band with two Chris’? I assume you do last names or nicknames?
BRYN: They’re both last name guys. Lawless on drums and Johns right here.
CHRIS: I think eventually that’s going to date us as a band. I think that the name Chris is going out in popularity. If you introduce yourself as Chris in the year 2045 people are gonna be like, “Oh you guys still use instruments? We just think of a song and the algorithm builds it for us.”
BRYN: My boyfriend is named Chris too, who I’ve been with since the band started.
CHRIS: The drummer of the band I just had to leave but still love Common Sage is named Chris too. I’m envious because Lawless has the sickest last name, Johns it’s significantly less badass.
GSC: What was that era of the band like when Bartees left and Lawless came in?
CHRIS: When Bartees left, Vishnu and I were starting a screamo side project, and several of those songs became songs on Viewing. We had just started and were telling Bryn about it when we found out Bartees was leaving.
BRYN: It was a weird day for me. I went to Chris’ house to practice as I am wont to do. They were like, we’ve been writing screamo songs just me and Vishnu. I was like, “Huh?” Then Bartees came over and was like, I’m out. And I was like, “HUUUH??”
GSC: He became Strange.
BRYN: Well he was already doing that. I had been giving him feedback on his solo record and was very supportive of his solo stuff, it was really cool. He said he wanted to focus on that. So after he left, I don’t remember that day but I remember us being like okay, I guess these are the songs we have to move forward with. We scrambled to find a guitarist, then we wrote that song “Off Season”. That song is really a good distillation of what we were feeling at the time. We needed a break and we’re trying to get things back together. It was a little stressful, but I don’t remember being that stressed though. We were already recording stuff and just decided to keep going forward.
GSC: “Off Season” really feels like a demarcation point in your catalog too where your sound came together.
BRYN: Yea, that song. We were trying out Lawless, figuring out his style and how it worked with ours. Johns was writing about…
CHRIS: Our friends’ bands!
BRYN: Yeah, and why we were even doing this band. At the time, it was the most straightforward song we’d written lyrically. We want to keep doing this and having fun with it. “Off Season” was saying that loudly to affirm it for ourselves.
GSC: After “Offseason” came out, you were beginning to write Viewing and you wrote it for a very different world than the one that you would release it in. What was the process of writing Viewing like? What were you hoping to get out of it?
CHRIS: I don’t think I’m ever hoping to get anything out of this stuff. I always say the same thing, but I just sit in my room and write music all the time. Nothing has changed for me for 15 years. I want to jam with my friends and get the good ones on wax. You know? I don’t think about it much, much more than that.
BRYN: Yeah… I do.
**Group Laugh**
BRYN: Viewing, for me, is very specifically about loss and grief. Johns wrote songs that were mostly in that same field, partially because it’s what I was pushing, I think. It was visceral, maybe not as thoughtful in retrospect.
CHRIS: We had feelings man!
BRYN: We had feelings and we had to get them out. It’s hard for me to not be writing about how I’m feeling at the moment. Viewing for me was getting out my feelings about what I had just gone through. It’s dark that record, it’s very dark. When we wrote that record, I started thinking, what is the point of writing a record this hard to listen to? Do I as an artist want people to feel sad? Do I want to give people a space to feel bad in a healthy way? I guess? I don’t know if Viewing is successful at the latter. Like, A Crow Looked at Me by Mount Eerie is a perfect record that was recorded a week after his wife died, but it is only for that feeling.
GSC: Yea, that’s not going on at the pregame.
BRYN: You are only listening to that when you want to lay on the floor and cry. I think Viewing is more in that feeling. “Ivy” is a great song that you can kinda put on whenever but it is still sad. That album is emo to me in that it’s emotional.
GSC: What was 2020 like after putting out Viewing? Like it was well received but you can’t be out with the people, I am sure it was a little bittersweet.
CHRIS: I think I was mostly looking at it like, well, everything else is bad. At least this is nice.
BRYN: When the record came out in April 2020 people legit thought this will be done soon. Can’t be much more than a couple weeks, months. So in April I think we were just hyped, like dang whenever we can play shows I am sure they’ll be way sicker.
GSC: I love the lead off track on Viewing “Revisionist”. How did that song come together and how did you know that you wanted it to lead off the record?
BRYN: John came up with the imagery of someone editing reels of film, trying to obsessively edit their own past. The title Viewing is a double meaning of looking at your own past as well as a literal funeral viewing. “Revisionist” felt like a good introduction to the record, it shows that person, someone trying to change the unchangeable.
CHRIS: I would have passed on that question.
BRYN: I know, you’re like that even with new stuff. Akira Kurosawa said, “If I could tell you what the movie meant, I would have written it on a sign” and that is Johns’ philosophy. I think it’s probably cooler to just let people listen to the record and figure it out for themselves, but I don’t know. I do like people to know there is real intentionality and purpose behind these songs.
CHRIS: I’ve often compared Bryn to my musical therapist. The songs are Rorschach images. I’ll have a song and she’ll press me like “It means something! Why did you say this word or that phrase like that?”
GSC: I love that dynamic. “Ivy” felt like a genuine hit from that record. That is your biggest song to date right?
CHRIS: I think yeah, and that’s probably the song we put the least thought into. The intro guitar line Lawless was playing but in 11/4 time. We kept hearing it and we were like, dude, play it regular. He did and we were like “OOOOOO YEA!” I still have a recording of the first time we played it. We wrote all in one pass from there.
BRYN: Even the chorus and the vocals, it was basically done.
CHRIS: I went home and finished the vocals at home an hour later and it was done.
GSC: How great was it when you finally were playing shows? Did any tracks really hit in particular?
CHRIS: We did a cool BrooklynVegan livestream and I had never been nervous for a show before but I was sweating.
BRYN: That’s funny, because I was gonna pass out, I felt I was hyperventilating. I was so anxious and I thought you were fine. Nobody was there, it was just Andrew from BrooklynVegan and his significant other and the crew to film it. It felt so weird having no feedback in the moment.
CHRIS: Then a month later we got suddenly put on this show with Movements at Bowery Ballroom in front of hundreds more than had ever seen us. We hadn’t really practiced and I was also sweating, and then everything was fine.
BRYN: I am trying to think of what the first non New York show was when we got back. Maybe The World Is A Beautiful Place tour? Fest was sick too.
CHRIS: If anyone from the Fest staff read this, please just change the number to the year. I love Fest but that is so confusing.
BRYN: This is getting into what Ferried Away is about where after the pandemic, the music scene and the city will ever be back to “normal” because different people live here now. A lot of venues closed and we’re a different band now. There’s still fun to be had though. When we went on tour with AwakeButStillInBed were some of the most fun shows we’ve ever done, people were there to have fun.
GSC: Such a sick band AwakeButStillInBed.
CHRIS: Their new record is just phenomenal.
BRYN: I was just playing Dark Souls with Shannon! She rules. We’re doing a run of Dark Souls 2 right now but on tour we did a whole run of Dark Souls 1. That run was hilarious because she played a healer who couldn’t attack and I played a strength character who couldn’t heal, so it was a challenge run.
GSC: In 2022 you dropped the Blight EP. “Hollow” and “Fracture” were the two I really love from that tape. What was the mood like as you were working on and putting out that EP?
CHRIS: That was largely an internet back and forth project between me and our drummer Vishnu. He was sending me drum loops constantly. I didn’t realize it then but reflecting a year later I was like oh, it sounds like we were all in a really bad place then. I think it’s cool that it’s slower and darker but we weren’t trying to do that. It just happened.
GSC: What was life like then?
BRYN: We couldn’t see each other very much because of quarantine. Towards the end of writing that EP I felt really alienated from the band because I have no experience writing by myself. I’m a very collaborative artist in general, musician or otherwise. If I do anything I need people to bounce off of, so not really having that made me feel like I was outside of the process. That was frustrating for me, and I think the process was really frustrating for everyone else for different reasons. We ended up doing it really quickly and learned a lot about how we work best together in the process.
GSC: Moving into the new record, you were recording this during the summer of 2022 and wanted to make more dancey music that people could have some fun with. What had you in such a good mood then? What were you jamming to?
BRYN: 2022 we all got vaxx’d up. Parties started happening more, we were going to bars and to shows, taking bike rides and enjoying life. I really liked the Dogleg record from then.
GSC: I actually interviewed their bassist, he was a semi pro Smash 64 player.
BRYN: They do talk about “Fox” and “Falco”. I play with the Fire Emblem girl on Ultimate now.
GSC: I play Yoshi on Ultimate but Pikachu on the 64 one. I am in Elite Smash with Yoshi, not to brag.
CHRIS: Every time I hear people talk about Super Smash characters it sounds like nerd astrology.
GSC: How did the record’s Steeplechase theme coalesce? What was your relationship with Coney Island before this record?
BRYN: I love New York City and its history for starters. Johns has been reading The Power Broker which I read a while ago.
JOHN 📸: The 99% Invisible podcast is doing a series on The Power Broker I highly recommend.
BRYN: It’s funny you mention a pod. This podcast The Memory Palace had an episode called Dreamland where they talked about the fire in 1907 that burned down Dreamland and Steeplechase Park, which got my head thinking about that place and time. I found the cover image for the record early.
GSC: Beautiful cover by the way.
BRYN: That was the summer and that image also got me thinking about Coney Island. The other most direct constellation is that I spread my partner’s ashes at Steeplechase Pier, and that is what much of Viewing is about. We spent a lot of time here. Another friend who I was telling you booked shows for all those places, she died that year. I went to the Mermaid Parade with her several times, she had that guy (on the wall) tattooed on her. My best friend also coincidentally likes to come here in the summers to ride the Cyclone. It all felt so connected. I started thinking about what we were writing about, how the world and our lives have changed, and I started thinking about Coney Island as this place that rarely exists. Everyone loves it but you only go like once a year, like you’re checking the box for the summer. That’s how people can become. Your friend moves upstate and then you’re like, I’m gonna try to still be friends with you. But it’s like, I’m gonna come up to your house for a weekend, and that’s really our relationship. It’s not that you don’t love them or care about the relationship anymore, but it’s all we can really give. So Coney Island felt like the place where this limbo exists.
GSC: I really feel like Coney Island does embody that spirit, both the great times and the knowledge they won’t last. My parents met working at an infamous bar in Bay Ridge called Peggy O’Neill’s that closed in 2009, but their Coney Island outpost, which was on the Steeplechase grounds, stayed open till 2016. We grew up going to Brooklyn Cyclones baseball games in Coney Island too, so I look back on it fondly in a similar way.
BRYN: It’s not just Coney Island either, it’s specifically these amusement parks. They kind of still exist, there is a park at a place where there once was a park, but it all feels like it’s built on top of a graveyard. There is a line on “Sweet Stripe” thats like “Was this Glassands in the spin lights of a Sweetgreen?” You go places and it’s some random bullshit salad chain or whatever, and you’re like aren’t these walls a place where Real Estate played? This is a place the Yeah Yeah Yeahs played all the time and now you have to do spin classes to be here. I just realized they’re gonna jump in the water (pointing towards the Polar Bear Club people we’re sharing the bar with).
CHRIS: I think they just got back from the water.
GSC: You gotta earn that jacket man. I love the record cover by the way, how did you find that image?
BRYN: I was walking in Park Slope and saw one of those lending libraries, and I found a book with the image on the cover. I don’t know that we’d written more than two songs for the record, but for some reason, I was like, this is a vibe. We wanted to credit the artist, and we were like, how do we get rights to this? We literally have permission from Penguin Random House to use the cover, But they were like, we don’t know if we can even give that permission. Nobody owns the rights they said. The artist was a salary artist for another publishing house back in the 70s that Penguin RandomHouse bought out.
CHRIS: I really hope we get sued because that means we’re popping. You don’t get sued if you’re not popping.
JOHN 📸: I hope he finds it because he’s a fan of the band and that and that it’s all love.
CHRIS: I also hope that an 85 year old artist is still alive and gets to rediscover his work through our post hardcore album.
BRYN: Just an 85 year old man in the mosh pit.
CHRIS: **Old Guy Voice** This kinda sounds like that one Cursive album.
GSC: “Bon Z’s” is a great lead off and really brings you into the theme park. How did that track come about?
CHRIS: That’s one of my favorite songs we’ve ever done. The first song on your album is supposed to be the thesis statement. What is the setting, the mood, the tempo, the dynamics. We brought a bit of everything we needed to do on the record to that track. The intro was hours and hours of searching for dumb sound bites and pitch shifting them just enough so we won’t also get sued for that.
BRYN: I am pretty sure they’re public domain. We had a movie clip in one of the songs that we changed, now my boyfriend says it on “A Backyard”.
GSC: I love “A Backyard”. Stereogum compared it to Modest Mouse. I was hearing more Oso Oso honestly.
CHRIS: I hear that. We love Oso Oso, Basking in The Glow especially. He’s one of our favorite producers of all time. I get the Modest Mouse thing too though because there were a couple of those little bendy guitar lines where I remember being at my apartment like “Guys look, it’s like Modest Mouse!”
GSC: What is that track about?
CHRIS: That song lyrically is about my good friend, Zack Sawka. He lives in New Jersey and my friend and I biked out to his house. It took hours. We ended up on the highway because Google Maps is like, bike lane, bike lane, bike lane… oh no we don’t care anymore. So we biked I-95 and somehow made it alive. I hadn’t seen him in months, I was his best man at his wedding, and we were best friends in college. He’s a perfect example of the kinds of friends and loved ones the album is about. You know everything about each other and still have that extremely tight knit relationship though things are different. He texted me the day it came out saying man, this song really touched me. Then he called me the next day saying we got to meet up because he realized it was about him. We hadn’t ever written songs so personal about specific people before and it was a little nerve wracking for me and Bryn. Him realizing it on his own like that was incredible.
GSC: “An Invitation” is another absolute ripper. It is a very peppy track that nonetheless talks about meeting your friends next at the casket. How do you deal with that emotional and sonic roller coaster as you’re putting this kinda song together?
CHRIS: I think it just happens where you write a happy sounding song that ends up having sadder lyrics, I don’t necessarily think we plot it out to be like that per se.
BRYN: It was maybe the second song we wrote for Ferried Away so it has a heavy Viewing-esque outro. It also was the beginning of us saying the summer is really great. What if we played songs that make us feel great? The bass line in the intro was Interpol or Strokes-esque, trying to channel some indie sleaze. The instrumentation is fun but lyrically that one was more Johns.
CHRIS: It is about a good friend of mine. The two of us didn’t necessarily treat each other that great. It evened out over time and we’re still friends to an extent, but like the song says,
BRYN: “When the invitation comes is it a wedding or a death?”
CHRIS: There are so many people now who you may only see at those kinds of events for the rest of your life. Like you just get pragmatic and realize it’s five times here and six times there where you’ll see this person again. You can count them almost on your fingers.
GSC: “A Town to Give Up In” was specifically about Vishnu, and his relationship with New York. Is there anything about that track and Vishnu’s relationship to the city you’d be comfortable talking about?
CHRIS: He’s looked around, he’s browsed. The name of the song came when we were on tour and we stopped in a little town somewhere in Connecticut. One of us was just like, “Man, this would be such a nice town to give up in.” I know that Vish has seen it as alluring, weighing the pros and cons of the niceties of each kind of life especially as you get older and in theory slow down.
BRYN: We were so collaborative on this record I don’t really remember if I even had a hand in crafting this song or not. For me, the suburbs exist as a catacomb. It’s not just about giving up the grind but for me it feels like representational for giving up on life. I don’t feel that same allure that Vish or even maybe Johns feels. I feel anxiety and disgust when I’m in a place like that. But Vishnu does see the appeal of settling down, taking it easier.
CHRIS: And enjoying his life.
GSC: “Sweet Stripe” rocks. How did that song come together? What does that track about?
BRYN: That song is about my friend who was one of the first people I knew here in New York when I moved. I looked up to her, she was a little older than me. This bar was her vibe to a T, she had a little peppermint sweet stripe tattoo. She was from Baltimore and unfortunately died in Baltimore just a few years ago. She worked in film but had family hardships and left New York a while ago so I hadn’t seen her in six to eight years. So we were extremely close, we had a little romance though we were mostly just good friends, then she moved and we didn’t see each other at all, and then she died. I had this very personal grief in my life in 2014 when my partner died, and this was a very different feeling. Not less impactful, just the ways that my emotions changed and who she was to me had changed. The way all of the memories I’ve had with her were in places that didn’t really exist anymore like Glasslands and Baby Castles and 285 Kent had me thinking about the way time marches. Anyway, a tribute to her would be fun and rocking just like her. Johns had written the Dinosaur Jr. riff, so I wrote that from there as a tribute to Erin.
GSC: Album closer “Steeplechase” really brings us home thematically. How did that come together and how did you decide that was the closer?
BRYN: We always struggle with closing tracks, probably because of me. Johns is not a theater kid and doesn’t like the theatricality and I’m not really a theater kid but I do like theatricality.
GSC: You got the film school background.
CHRIS: You’re like goth theater.
BRYN: I want there to be a thematic arc to a record. There are some records that I like that are just songs, but records that are cohesive and thematically fulfilling are much higher on my list. “Steeplechase” was all in pieces at first. Johns had that riff and I knew it had to go somewhere. He was like that doesn’t need to go anywhere.
CHRIS: I said it needed to go into the trash can. All I had was the riff and I was like there is no way this is a song but I’ll send it to Bryn before throwing it out and she said “Don’t throw it out!”
BRYN: It’s in 6/4 and has a weird rhythm to it, so it was a real push and pull. Once we figured out the last verse and got the horns on there I was like this is gonna be the ending. I just remember a lot of conversation between me and Chris of like, how did these lyrics work? I had a really strong concept, but he didn’t really know what he wanted to put in there. I wanted it to be about leaving. You’ve had this time on memory lane at Steeplechase Park and now you’re taking the ferry back to your normal life, you’re being Ferried Away we could say. Trying to explain that and not sound too cheesy was very hard. It required work to give it that really big crescendo and make it feel like a moment of catharsis. I am really proud of that one and how we brought it together.
GSC: The horns really bring that track and so much of the album together.
BRYN: The last thing you hear on the record is his clarinet.
GSC: I love that. How did the horns become such a big part of the record?
CHRIS: We did a lot of the writing in my apartment and there were just these parts in my head that **does mouth trumpet** came out like that. I wanted to leave them as me doing the mouth trumpet in the mix, but everyone was like no way man. We worked with our trumpeter Matt Hull from the band Really From who absolutely killed it. Half the parts were written by me with the mouth trumpet and he came and wrote a bunch more, including all the parts on “Steeplechase”. There is some mouth trumpet on the record though very quietly in the mix which I am genuinely proud of.
GSC: I know you said you’re already working on whatever is next for the band. Is there anything you took from recording this album that is influencing the next?
CHRIS: I would say the biggest influence is never wanting to spend that much money.
BRYN: For me it was the process. During Blight, I was clashing with Johns, we were not working together well. We did a ton of work right before and during the beginning of Ferried Away where I really felt like we clicked as songwriters and collaborators again, churning stuff out that we both really like. Once we finally finished the record, we didn’t stop working because it was just fun. We’re in a pattern of what are you doing tonight? What do you got this weekend? Nothing? Okay, I’ll see you then. So there were sounds we thought might be too weird for this record we’re experimenting with, but again for us it’s all about having fun.
GSC: The question I always like closing on is what is something that brings you joy that people may be surprised about or just wouldn’t otherwise know about?
CHRIS: I find it inefficient to have other hobbies besides music.
BRYN: You like basketball.
GSC: Playing or watching?
CHRIS: Watching the NBA. I like the Sixers but I mostly just like watching good basketball.
BRYN: I am pretty open about all my hobbies, I am always jumping from things.
GSC: You have a couple of podcasts right?
BRYN: I do. One about movies, one more like politics and whatnot. But I think my most recent hobby is playing trading card game called Flesh and Blood.
GSC: Is that through Wizards of the Coast?
BRYN: Completely independent company called Legend Story Studios. The owner and designer worked for Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh and built this out over a decade. It reminds me of Dark Souls.
GSC: How did you get tapped in?
BRYN: I was into poker through college, I used to play a weekly game in New York through NYC free poker. They weren’t allowed to charge money but if you won you won real money, and then if you had the most points in the city, they’d pay your way to the World Series. So you can say I liked card games.
BRYN: That is wild.
BRYN: My boyfriend had played Magic and in the pandemic we were looking for something like that but less expensive and this game had come out in 2019 so we figured we’d give it a try. It’s now in its fifth year and seems to be growing in popularity too.
GSC: Are you good?
BRYN: No, my boyfriend is really good. He got into the pro tour and made Nationals. We went to Vegas two times in the past two years to play.
GSC: That’s so beast.
